


oh brooklyn, brooklyn, take me in

by vystrx



Category: Captain America (Movies), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Heavy-handed dealing with trauma and PTSD, Hot cocoa as an honest to god Pavlovian style therapy technique, M/M, Mentions of suicidal ideation/tendencies, Messy emotions literally everywhere, References to HYDRA stuff, Seriously a lot of it, Slow Burn, comic! clint barton, lots of guilt, memory lane is a shitty fucking place to walk, mentions of war and violence, mostly canon compliant until catws, probably awful coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-20 08:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14256927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vystrx/pseuds/vystrx
Summary: If only it were that easy. If only it worked like that, if only the bits and pieces of himself could be discarded along the way. But that’s not how it goes. Bucky knows that much for sure, because he’s spent too long trying.





	1. are you aware of the shape i'm in?

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so first things first: the canon in this fic is cherry-picked from both Fraction & Aja's Hawkeye comics and the actual MCU canon, with gratuitous liberties taken, (mostly) canon-compliant up until Winter Soldier.  
> Second: there are multiple references to suicidal ideation, death, violence, HYDRA torture, etc. throughout this fic. It also deals heavily with trauma, PTSD, and war. Nothing too graphic, but please be careful reading if those things are sensitive subjects for you.  
> Third: There's a companion playlist for this fic if that's your kinda thing, you can find it [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/aelithica/playlist/227lWLhZoitABElk4LVPYh?si=MnZLmZ0QRWuOc61QxD31dA)!  
> Without further ado: enjoy!

He doesn’t recognize the girl that finds him.

 

“Hey, you!”

 

He tries to get up and run, but the world tilts sickeningly sideways and he only manages a weak stumble along the wall before he crashes back down again. Panic lights up in his chest, clawing its way up his throat as she closes in on him, eyes catching on the little forest of feathered spikes growing up from her back. 

 

“You’re him, aren’t you?”

 

Arrows. That’s the word. He tries to get up, again, ends up curling metal fingers into the worn-rough brick and tugging himself backward a few inches before it crumbles in his grip. 

 

“I’m Kate.”

 

She stops, popping one hip out and flashing him a smile. He stares up at her, hands itching to pull a gun he doesn’t have, blow her face to hell and back.  _ Run! Get up and run! _

 

“You look like you could use a place to stay for the night. Not to mention a shower and a hot meal.”

 

She sticks out a hand. He looks at it, stares at the fingers waiting for a blade to appear between them and slice him open. 

 

Somewhere between waiting for her to land a knife between his ribs and every bit of himself screaming at him to run as far and as fast as he can, she manages to sweet-talk him into letting her hoist him up, looping his real arm around her shoulders. He’s too tired to protest much. It’s slow going, giving her plenty of time to slit his throat and dump his body somewhere they won’t find it for at least a few hours. But she doesn’t. She keeps talking to him, words that don’t land right on his ears, too soft and rounded to make much sense. It passes in a haze as they weave through twilight foot traffic, duck through the door of a building.

 

They climb a flight of stairs. Then another. And another. By the time they stop moving, she’s muttering curses. He’d recognize those in any language. She shoves a key in the lock and twists, staggering through the door sideways to get him through it right. He’s decided by now that she’s not half bad. Especially when she sits him down all gentle on something so soft he thinks he might melt right through it and disappear between the floorboards, only grunting another sharp-tongued curse when the tip of an arrow gets caught in his rag of a shirt and tears. He doesn’t pay it much attention, too tired to care.

 

The feeling dragging at the bottom of his feet, he realizes, sluggishly, is exhaustion. He curls his hand into a fist just to hear the metal hiss and shift against itself, taking comfort in the sound. The girl looks at it, steps back, pulls the bouquet of arrows off her back -  _ quiver _ , he thinks, blinking at the word as it surfaces - and a bow follows it, filling her hands with weapons and fanning the fire in his lungs all over again.  _ Go! Run! _

 

Except she doesn’t kill him. Doesn’t sink an arrow into the soft part of his throat where it’s exposed, doesn’t blind him with a neat shot to the eye. It would be easy from this distance, even for a kid with the soft smile she’s giving him.  She pulls a chair over instead, drops the bow and quiver to the floor with a clatter and then flings herself into it, haphazard, looking at him strangely. 

 

“So,” she starts, the word making it through the fog crowding his head after a second’s delay, “have you been in Brooklyn this whole time?”

 

_ Brooklyn.  _ The word rolls around his head and sticks there, warm. Comforting. Home. A thousand miles away, a thousand years. Another life entirely. The girl’s still looking at him like she wants an answer. To what, exactly? He tries to pull the question back and fails. The fog is curling tight around him, now, swallowing everything in its path. 

 

“Right. Strong and silent type. I get it.”

 

She stands up. He watches her with his head tipped all the way back against the cushion, hands spread loose in his lap. Hair falling across his face. She says something else, something he doesn’t catch because she’s turning away, taking her bow and arrows with her. He watches her go, disappear out of his field of vision, and then listens. Expecting a cocked gun, maybe. Something other than the quiet rustling he hears, the shuffling and returning footsteps before he’s presented with a blanket. It falls into his lap, soft and warm, and he just looks at it. Looks back up. 

 

“Just, uh. Shout if you need anything? Or not? I’ll be around.”

 

With that, she turns and disappears again, out of his sight. He looks at the wall for a while, listens for something. He’s not really sure what.  _ Have you been in Brooklyn this whole time? _ Sleep takes him. It sneaks up on him quiet and unnoticed, the way it always does, one second he’s watching the wall sit still and silent and the next he’s slipping sideways, body curling in on itself before he drifts somewhere else entirely. 

 

He knows he’s dreaming. He knows it like he feels the body next to him in bed, shaking in the cold and struggling to breathe. They’re curled up together tight under a too-thin blanket, trying desperately to ward off the winter chill, but it isn’t working. They’re curled up together again and this time he’s the one shaking, shoulders bent over a fire tearing him apart from the inside out, but he doesn’t tell anyone. Doesn’t let it show on his face. Smiles and listens to something go up in flames in the distance. Then he’s falling, wind whipping through his hair with a scream following him, ragged and too thin to hold on to. 

 

“Jesus, Kate, what the hell?”

 

A voice drags him back to the surface of reality. He doesn’t move, eyes staying shut tight. Let them think he’s still sleeping.

 

“I found him in the alley,” she explains, hushed.

 

Footsteps, coming closer. Then backing up. More whispering. His hand is curled tight into a fist against his body, cold where it presses against his skin through the holes in his shirt. They’re still talking about him in night-soft voices, saying things like  _ where else is he supposed to go _ and  _ he can’t stay here forever. _

 

That’s okay. He doesn’t plan on being here very long, anyways. They’ve moved on to talking about something else. Someone else, he thinks, catching hold of the name  _ Steve _ right before he slips away again, the familiarity of it brushing warm and brief against him before it’s gone again. 

 

When he comes back this time it’s morning, there’s sun falling across the floor in front of him in golden squares. Someone’s moving nearby, floorboards creaking softly with their weight. He’s up before he knows it’s happening, crouching low and moving fast. There’s a door, to the right of it, a body. A person. Standing up, holding a mug in one hand and a newspaper in the other, looking at him with wide, surprised eyes.

 

“Morning,” he says, setting the paper aside and stepping closer. He flinches back, bodily, expecting a hand open against his face, but the blow never comes. There’s enough space between the stranger and the door so he goes for it, hand on the knob, twisting. 

 

“Hey, man, wait! Don’t-”

 

He leaves the stranger behind, fleeing up a flight of stairs, throwing himself around a corner and taking them two at a time until there’s another door, heart hammering rapid-fire in his chest. Limbs still clumsy with hunger, all three except the metal that closes around another knob and turns, throws the door open to let in all the light and city air, the sounds that flood over him and only barely cover the sound of feet behind him. Every instinct tells him to run, to dive over the edge of the building and hopes he hits the ground running, but he walks slow instead. Something else is controlling him, a ghost of a memory that caresses his cheek and draws him forward to let the sun fall over him, too, drape its warmth over his skin.  _ Have you been in Brooklyn this whole time? _

 

The feet stop behind him. He’s too busy staring out at the world presented to him in a honey-sweet light, following the skyline close and trying to pick apart which pieces he knows like home, which pieces are new and jaggedly unfamiliar. It’s impossible. The haze of time clouds the memories too much, makes them too vague. A bottle of whisky passed back and forth on the fire escape, watching the stars. Two pairs of feet hanging over the edge, daring death to come and grab their ankles. Two blankets twisted around them, threadbare and the only defense against warm air that freezes on skin that isn’t his no matter what, wrapping his arms around shivering shoulders and trying to give away his heat. Nights wasted tossing handfuls of pebbles down dark alleyways, days spent scuffling and patching up split lips, bruised cheekbones. 

 

He remembers all of these things. They’ve come back, in dreams and in waking, bits and pieces he’s painstakingly cobbled together to try and rebuild the rest of him, fill in the holes they punched him full of. He doesn’t realize he’s breathing hard until he can’t get enough air, until the feeling of  _ remembering _ comes up to choke him all over again.

 

“You found the roof,” the person behind him says dryly, and he turns, finds a shock of sleep-mussed blond hair and bruises and-

 

“Steve?”

 

The whisper takes both of them by surprise. It’s rough, raspy. Hasn’t used his voice in a while. Brown eyes. Not-Steve has brown eyes. They’re sad, too, but not the right color. He’d know that color anywhere, used to look at him and fall head over heels into them. Falling. He does that a lot. Thinks about doing it now, right over the side of the building just to escape the way Not-Steve is looking at him, with a frown that’s trying to be a smile but it’s not working out too well. 

 

“Nah,” he says, finally, and holds out a hand. “Clint.”

 

He looks at the hand. Blinks at it. Opens his mouth to say something but can’t find the words, can’t figure out how to make his voice work again. Clint nods and tucks it into his pocket again, motions back towards the open door with a jerk of his head.

 

“Come back inside. I got bagels and some coffee with your name all over it.”

 

_ Your name. _ He has a lot of those, a real selection. He doesn’t know which one is the real him, not really. If that person even exists at all anymore. Clint turns and walks back inside without waiting for an answer, leaving him to look back out at the city surrounding them, already awake in the morning sunlight. Blinks the years out of his eyes, the memories, and follows him down the stairs, pulling the door shut behind himself out of good conscience, the sound of his hand on the metal knob almost surprising. It brings him back to the present, at least, long enough to follow Clint back to the door he’d run from without mistaking him for a ghost again. 

 

He’s handed coffee and a plate with a bagel on it, both warm to the touch. Clint sits with him, not saying much. Afterwards, he takes the dishes and cleans them, the running water the only noises besides the quiet whirring of his arm as he shifts in his seat, wanting to get up and run all over again. Every part of him is screaming to, now that there’s food in his stomach and he doesn’t feel like he’s going to trip over his own feet any second. He could run again, run as far away as possible so he doesn’t have to look out over the world and feel that same terrible feeling like he’s stuck in molasses, slow and dragged down by bits and pieces he can only string together right half the time, the other half he’s just drowning in all of it, faces he doesn’t recognize but he  _ knows them,  _ because that hurts worse than anything else. 

 

“How long’ve you been here?”

 

Clint settles down across from him again, hands folded around another mug like he’s holding it just for something to do. 

 

“In Brooklyn, I mean.”

 

His whole life. The answer almost rolls off his tongue, almost  _ I grew up here,  _ but that was a long time ago. He’d looked for the building, for a while. Roamed the streets up and down until one felt right, but they never did. Everything was all wrong, twisted and mangled and he didn’t have enough pieces to make sense of the puzzle. He realizes he’s screwing his face up tight, looking at the table like it’ll grow a mouth and tell him exactly how long he’s spent wandering the streets, running himself ragged and starving. Too long. Not long enough.

 

“I’ll stop buggin’ you,” Clint says, standing up. “Sorry for asking so many questions. It’s just-- they’ve been looking for you, Bucky.”

 

Pause.  _ Bucky.  _ He doesn’t ask who  _ they _ is. A lot of people are looking for him.

 

“Is it cool if I call you that? I mean, I don’t really know what else to-”

 

Clint clears his throat.  _ Bucky. _ Shakes his head. 

 

“You can take a shower if you want. I got some clothes you can borrow, too.”

 

“Yeah,” he says, voice slow, rough with disuse. “I… yeah.”

 

Clint nods. Shows him the shower, hands him a towel that he -  _ Bucky _ \- thinks might be the softest thing he’s felt in a while. Ever, maybe. Tells him the faucet’s touchy, eyes his arm and asks if it’s okay to get wet. Bucky remembers jumping into the river, plunging after a falling body and thinking there was something wrought with irony about the whole thing as he shook water out of the joints of his hand and only looked back once before running. 

 

He’s right about the faucet. The water goes steaming hot then ice-cold, finally landing somewhere in the middle after a few minutes of pushing the dial back and forth. Bucky stands under the water and closes his eyes, tilts his head back and lets it stream down over him. It’s comforting, in a strange sort of way. A reminder that he’s got a body, a real flesh-and-blood one, mostly. Not the machine he thinks of himself as sometimes, still, on bad days. A person. With his own thoughts in his own head, scattered and fractured as they are most of the time. He scrubs the dirt from his skin, washes his hair clean and runs his fingers through until they don’t catch anymore, stays there until the water goes cold and refuses to warm up again. 

 

There’s a pile of clothes left outside the door for him, folded haphazardly. Clint’s nowhere to be found, but he takes them back to the solitude of the bathroom and changes there anyway, enjoying the way the walls close around him and shut out the rest of the world. Hair dripping wet patches into the borrowed shirt, Bucky leaves the towel draped over the door’s corner and his old clothes in a dirty heap in the corner. They’re no use to him anymore. 

 

“Hi, again.”

 

That voice is familiar. The girl from the night before is sitting on the couch, smiling at him. 

 

“Hi,” he grits out, swallowing past the sand in his throat.

 

“He speaks!”

 

Bucky looks at the door, wondering how far he’d make it before she catches up with him. Before she spears him straight through the knee with one of the arrows she had with her, takes him down. He’s not as strong as he used to be, not as resilient. Even if he was, it’s not like he has much to defend himself with. He could disappear into the streets easy enough, but he doesn’t know them the way he used to. Can’t remember which alley connects through to which street and which is a dead end.

 

“Kate, don’t harass the guy.”

 

Clint appears from a set of stairs, and Bucky almost bolts instinctively, feeling his chest tighten at being outnumbered. Then a scrap of fur with a nose and pink tongue attached follows Clint at the heel and he stares at it, a memory sparking distant and disjointed. He can’t quite grab hold of it. The dog wags its tail, slips through Clint’s legs to hurry down the last few steps and cross the room to nose at his ankles. Bucky stands stock-still, not sure if he’s waiting to be bitten or for the dog to lose interest, decide he’s cold and metal like his arm and move on to more interesting things. 

 

“See? I told you Lucky’d like him. He has a thing for guys with baggage.”

 

She and Clint fall into a steady stream of banter, picking up and moving into the kitchen. They don’t pay him much mind after that, so Bucky returns the favor and settles into the couch, befriending Lucky quick enough. He figures out all his favorite places to be scratched, and by the time Clint tells him there’s food if he wants it, Lucky’s belly-up next to him, tail wagging against the cushions. It’s late afternoon when Kate leaves, bidding them both good-bye with a grin and a wave. Bucky watches her go, noticing how the light seems to bleed out into the hall after her, sneaking out under the hung-crooked door until the corners are draped in heavy shadow. Clint keeps looking at him. Sneaking glances like he thinks Bucky doesn’t notice. Waiting for something, maybe. For him to run again. For a weapon to appear in his hands. He’s not sure, really, but he gets it. Trust is a hard thing to come by, these days. 

 

Eventually, he gets up. Goes to the bathroom, shuts the door behind him and Bucky barely gives it a second before he’s scratching an apology behind Lucky’s ear and standing up. There are a pair of boots by the door, scuffed and worn-looking, about his size. He pauses to look at them, considering taking them, and decides against it. He’s taken enough. The door closes with a squeak, and Bucky doesn’t wait around to see if Clint heard. He takes the stairs two at a time, finds the door to the roof again and opens it, steps out to find the sun setting over the city. He remembers this. The chill that sets in just enough to make the bricks cool against his shoulders, even through the shirt he’s wearing. How things slow down, just a little, the world shrinking down to the pools of light thrown by the lamps. 

 

He lays flat on the ground. Stretches his real arm out and feels the cement sun-warm to the touch, closes his eyes. Tries to imagine a voice he can only dream whispers of. Opens them and looks up at the sky again, spends a while watching wisps of clouds slide sideways until it’s too dark to find where the stars end and the clouds start. It’s been a while since he’s done this, laid back and let the memories wash over him. He’s spent too long trying to run from them, Bucky thinks idly, lifting a metal finger and trying to trace a constellation, ends up making his own because he can’t remember which stars go where. A curl of bright pinpoints make a vine, like the ones that used to climb the walls despite not having dirt to dig their roots into. Surviving despite themselves. A jagged line, the clean break that had shot through his entire being right before he threw himself into the air, a pool of murky blackness beneath it the water he’d dragged the body out of. 

 

A rough circle. A shield. The red-white-blue that had wedged itself deep into his brain despite the bright white pain they’d tried to destroy him with. He’s shaking. It’s not cold, not yet. Another memory, this time appearing without the stars for a guide.  _ Fireworks. _ He’d dug the word from his chest when they went off the first time, startling him into knocking the table he’d been sitting at sideways. Scared the hell out of the poor girl trying to take the order he wasn’t planning on paying for and ran, fast and panicked, ducked around a corner and threw himself behind debris to hide from the shooter. Realized, minutes later, the explosions were coming from the sky. Thought the world was ending, until he looked up and saw the colors, felt a deep  _ need _ to be closer. He climbed someone’s fire escape, found the highest ground he could, and watched. The bangs made him twitch, but the colors soothed the panic. Reminded him of sugar-sweet cake. How he saved every penny for weeks and weeks to buy that sugar, burned the hell out of half of it but neither of them cared, ate every last bit together while the sky blew itself to bits over their heads. 

 

The memory slips from his fingers as fast as it came, leaving him staring at the sky to look for answers in its vast emptiness. He’s still shaking, full right up to the top with nervous energy. So he gets up, walks right up to the edge and looks over, staring down at the ground. Part of him wants to jump, hit the ground running and not stop until he leaves the buildings behind, the corners around which a thousand memories lie buried by decades of dust and dirt and evidence that the world moved on without him. Until he can’t think anymore, until he stops remembering things that make his heart clench tight in his chest, until all he can feel is the burning of his muscles and the sharp-edged flood of adrenaline. 

 

If only it were that easy. If only it worked like that, if only the bits and pieces of himself could be discarded along the way. But that’s not how it goes. Bucky knows that much for sure, because he’s spent too long trying. Too long running. He goes back inside. Walks down the stairs slow, quiet. Opens the door the same way, easing past the spot on the hinges that squeaks. Shuts it before looking into the dark of the apartment, eyes picking out a body, hunched over the table with a newspaper half-held in one hand. Clint wakes up as he settles into the couch and makes it creak, coughs himself awake and squints into the moonlight. 

 

“Bucky?”

 

He doesn’t say anything. Scratches Lucky behind one ear and looks at Clint, watches him stand up and walk over.

 

“You came back,” he says, almost like he doesn’t believe it. 

 

“Needed a place t’sleep,” Bucky tells him. Doesn’t say there isn’t anywhere else for him to go, not really. Doesn’t say he’s tired of running. 

 

Clint nods. Doesn’t get too close. Bucky pulls the blanket across himself and settles down across the cushions, listening to his arm whir and the couch protest softly. Yawning, Clint disappears up the stairs. He’s asleep again in minutes, snores drifting down into the apartment. Bucky lays awake for hours, trying to think about anything but the fleeting picture of couch cushions spread on the floor and long nights spent on them. 

 

He wakes up late, again. Disoriented. Clint feeds him, gives him coffee. Talks to him, a little. Asks questions Bucky doesn’t have an answer to. Apologizes for asking them. He leaves, again. Goes for a run, borrows those boots and takes comfort in the way they hit the ground heavy and meaningful. Breathes out his anxieties and then runs back. Comes home when it’s dark and quiet, leaves the boots by the door and says hello to Lucky. Clint isn’t as surprised this time, just says hello and goes to bed like he was waiting up. Kate’s there when he wakes up next, gone again by the time he comes back from wandering the streets, searching for a bakery that he doesn’t find, whose name he can’t remember but he can taste their cannoli vividly enough to make his mouth water. 

 

It’s comfortable, almost. Bucky gets used to the way Clint watches him out of the corner of his eye, wary and never quite sure what he’ll do next. How he stays up into the small hours of the morning until Bucky walks through the door, acts like he was just going to sleep anyway. There are good days, ones he spends petting Lucky and making quiet conversation, and bad ones that he spends remembering and running. Summer heat fades into fall and Bucky realizes he’s been here longer than he’s ever stayed in one place since he started trying to outrun his own head. Realizes he smiles at Clint without realizing it, lets him close enough to touch without flinching. Slings his sarcasm back at him, argues over which pizza place is better, sits through Dog Cops reruns even though he doesn’t really know what’s going on. The urge to run is still there, sometimes, when the memories get too overwhelming and he feels like he’s drowning in the past. So he runs. And comes back, every time.

 

Kate figures out Bucky laughs at even the worst puns and makes it her personal mission to make him smile so hard his face hurts every time she’s around. She sits with him on the roof, sometimes, to look at the stars and listen to the city keep on moving. He likes the companionship, and the fact that she doesn’t ask questions. Not ones that matter, anyways. Just lets him talk and talk until his voice goes scratchy like it was the first time he spoke to her, rough edges and too much unwanted emotion. Offers up a joke to distract him from the scattering pictures that slip away no matter how hard he tries to hold on, another to make him feel like he’s not just an assortment of broken pieces inside an ill-fitting skin. She gives him a jacket the day after she notices he’s shivering inside Clint’s loaned sweatshirt, perfect black leather that she swears she’s had forever, but he finds the tags in the trash later. He keeps it anyways, wears it always. Loves it like a second skin, because it’s  _ his _ . 

 

He hears them talking, sometimes, when they think he isn’t listening. When he wakes up without moving, lays under his blanket on the couch and does his best to understand their whispers. Catches things like  _ we have to tell them sometime _ and  _ let him breathe just a little longer _ and  _ they’re coming back soon  _ and  _ can’t keep him a secret forever, Kate.  _ And he’s alright with it, really. Never expected this to last as long as it has so far, anyways. So he smiles at Clint just a little more, makes an extra bad pun or two when Kate’s around just to hear her laugh, to remember it. And he waits for them to ask him to leave. 

 

The eviction notice comes unexpectedly one morning. It starts with a knock on the door while Bucky’s sitting at the table, one hand petting Lucky and the other holding a newspaper like he’s actually reading it. Clint’s gone, something about getting groceries and fresh air, and Kate hasn’t been around for a few days. The knock comes again, then a voice.

 

“Hey, Clint, you home?”

 

Bucky stands up. Looks over at the knives poking out of the block on the counter, wonders if he should grab one, just in case. Decides against it, because it might be a tenant and answering the door with a six-inch steak knife in hand isn’t exactly proper landlord’s houseguest behavior and he’s one hundred percent certain that if Clint loses a tenant because the ex-assassin currently sleeping on his couch feels the need to wave around unnecessarily large cooking knives, he’ll be out before the sun sets. And that wouldn’t be ideal, because he’s gotten to like not freezing half to death every night. He grabs the knob and turns it before the person on the other side can knock again, yanking it open and putting on his best  _ I’m not going to murder you but I’m definitely not happy about my morning being interrupted _ face. 

 

The man on the other side rapid-cycles through shock, disbelief, anger, and comes full-circle again, staring Bucky down like he’s looking at a ghost. Which isn’t far off, not really, and then realization dawns on his face and Bucky wants to dive for that knife again, gets a sudden stab of panic and it takes everything he has to keep standing there, eyeing him, waiting for him to make the first move. 

 

“You,” he says like he’s starting a sentence then changes his mind, leans sideways to look over his shoulder, suspicion sharpening his eyes. “Where’s Clint.”

 

It’s not a question. It’s too blunt to be one. More of an accusation,  _ what did you do to him? _ Bucky lifts a shoulder, drops it slow. Tilts his head to the side. 

 

“Out,” he answers, vague as ever, because like hell he’s about to give up Clint’s whereabouts to someone whose intentions he doesn’t know. “He’ll be back later.” 

 

He goes to shut the door, thinking that’s all the strange man with the recognition sparking to life in his eyes wants. A hand stops him, palm flat against the wood. 

 

“Why are you here.”

 

Again, not a question. The back of Bucky’s neck starts to prickle, instincts picking up on the fact that something’s not quite right in the way he’s being stared down. He’s tense before he realizes it, readying himself to knock the man out of the way and make a break for it should he reach for a hidden weapon. 

 

“Could ask you the same.”

 

“I live here.”

 

Bucky blinks. Looks at his face again, feels something familiar tug in the bottom of his gut like he’s seen him before, the same way turning a corner downtown does, the way he can never quite place but he knows he knows it. Should recognize it more than he does. He knows there’s something more to this story, a thread he hasn’t quite caught on to yet. It’s a familiar feeling these days.

 

“Never seen you around here,” Bucky tells him, because he’d  _ know _ if they’d met before, right? 

 

“Yeah,” comes the answer, like he should know better. “That’s ‘cause I’ve been running my ass around the damn world looking for you.”

 

_ They’ve been looking for you,  _ Clint told him. He remembers it clear as day, the way coffee had coated his tongue hot and rich and unfamiliar and he decided maybe it wasn’t so bad after all, staying in one place. Bucky stares at him, trying to unbury the hazy memory of where he’s seen this face before.

 

“How long have you been here?”

 

_ Forever, _ he wants to say, like he never left. Like the busy streets aren’t half-new to him all over again, even as he runs down them every day. Tries to memorize them like he used to but it’s not the same, not when everything is overlaid with badly-fit memories, too small here, too large there. Bucky lifts a shoulder, noncommittal shrug. Listens to the way the metal whirs softly beneath his jacket and curls the hand into a fist to hear the plates settle. 

 

“A while.”

 

The stranger shakes his head. Not-stranger, maybe. They’ve met before, he knows that much. The way his eyes dart sideways then jump back to Bucky’s face like he missed it is proof enough, wrapped up in a strange sort of longing that doesn’t feel like his own. 

 

“Shit, man. Coulda said something, you know. We were in Mississippi last month, lookin’ for you. Someone tipped us off, said they saw a dude walking around with a metal arm. You know how hot it is down there in September?”

 

_ We.  _ Who’s we? Bucky says nothing, still scrambling to find this particular piece of himself, whichever one it is that connects the two of them. 

 

“Look, just… stay here for a minute, okay? Don’t go anywhere.”

 

He sounds tired. Like Bucky felt when he first landed here, in Clint’s apartment, looking over the edge of the roof and trying to convince himself he wasn’t tired of running. The man turns, shaking his head, and goes for the stairs going up. Going to his apartment, maybe. Bucky looks back into Clint’s, the blanket balled up on one end of the couch and the little pile of borrowed clothes sitting on the floor next to it. The piece of real estate he’s carved out for himself, staking a claim to the kindness that’s been extended to him. The window beyond it, opening out over Brooklyn, a skyline he’s decided isn’t half bad, even with the new additions. Someone’s talking, quiet and muffled, and Bucky realizes this might be his chance. Pulls on the boots he still leaves by the door even though Clint gave them to him weeks ago, ties their laces with quick fingers. Something falls heavy above him. A book, maybe. Solid like pages, thin in his fingers when he spends hours sitting out in the fading sunlight on the roof, letting himself fall between the gaps in the letters and invent a new world around himself, one that isn’t fraught with holes and unstable ground. 

 

Bucky straightens up, steps out from the safety of the doorway. Expects the man to be coming back down with a gun, maybe, or a heavily-armed tactical squad to take him back and melt all his memories down into mush again. The not knowing is worse, he’s decided, even if the knowing, half-knowing, hurts. Not knowing isn’t  _ him _ , isn’t Kate and Clint and Lucky and Dog Cops at three in the morning when nobody can sleep, isn’t drinking coffee in the same chipped purple mug every morning because it’s his favorite. Isn’t this strange in-between life he’s built here, soothing the sting of knowing everything he’s forgotten with new memories on each street corner, like buying churros from the man at the end of the block with Kate and laughing when both of them end up with cinnamon-sugar all over their hands. 

 

He doesn’t expect  _ this. _

 

“Buck?”

 

That voice. He’d know that voice anywhere. It freezes him straight to the bone, makes his heart beat all choked and fluttery. He turns, slowly, can’t help the way his breath catches tight in his chest when he sees him framed by late-afternoon sun slipping in through the windows. That’s all it takes, one word and that look on his face, the sadness clinging deep in his eyes like it’ll never go away, ever, and Bucky’s head goes chaotic and sideways all at once. He steps back, bright liquid fear spreading through his insides as the memories flood over him, shivers wracking what parts of him can shake still, too human. Metal hums with the energy, steadying itself against an onslaught it doesn’t understand, curls tight and close and wants to hit things out of nowhere, smash the pain sliding across the face looking back at him. Bucky has to tear his eyes away when the picture goes double, one matching the version he sees now but in red and white and blue and standing tall and proud, the other weak and flimsy and holding his fists up to take on the whole world at once.

 

“No,” he chokes out, not sure who he’s talking to but meaning it all the same, “no, no,  _ no! _ ”

 

The last one goes hoarse and then he’s running, whipping around and forgoing the stairs entirely in favor of throwing himself over the railing, ignoring the shouts behind him. For one peaceful, terrible second he’s weightless, falling, and then the ground comes fast and forces him to duck a shoulder and roll, come up running and then he’s gone again, listening to his name being shouted over and over as he runs faster, pushes himself harder. Ducks and weaves through bodies and flings himself around turns, hears the echo of his own feet chasing him and skids sideways into construction to lose the tail. Tries to outrun the pictures tumbling through his head, again. Two boys with knobby knees laughing and swapping secrets until the night steals them away, tangles them up in dreams of each other. Blood on his tongue, in his eyes, on his knuckles, his and not. Wild grins, daring each other to climb higher and higher until the ground no longer lays claim to their bodies. Laying together in the silence of death, holding each other together with cold hands and tight smiles. Thick and thin. ‘Til the end of the line. Steve.  _ Steve.  _

 

He loses the person behind him and doesn’t even slow down. Finds ghosts on every block, throws himself past buildings and doorways he knows and doesn’t know all at once. Turns a corner and runs headlong into a fight he’d pulled Steve from kicking and shouting, keeps going until the phantom knuckles of his left hand stop aching. Keeps running until he can’t anymore and then walks until he can breathe without his ribs rattling and then runs again, keeps going and going and going until he ends up somewhere far enough that the buildings aren’t ghosts of a past life. He starts climbing, then, the walls pressing too close on him for comfort. By the time he settles into the corner of a rooftop and figures out how to breathe right it’s pitch-dark and there’s nothing left to stop the memories from closing over his head and pulling him under. 

 

Him and Steve on a rooftop, dancing to a song playing from the radio they’d stolen from the second-hand store, crackling and tinny. Him and Steve, laying together on a bed built for one, both of them trying to ignore the way he can never quite catch his breath. Him and Steve, curled up together in a tent in the middle of the woods, Bucky ice-cold and Steve a furnace, closing their eyes against the distant gunfire. Him and Steve, together. Over and over and over, years of memories sliding past his eyes one after another until he wants to scream, until he wants to fling himself from the roof and land in a broken heap at the bottom. 

 

Except he doesn’t. He sits there, knees curled to his chest, and remembers. Steve, starting fights on summer-hot mornings. Steve, taking stolen scissors to his hair right before they go out dancing. Steve, shivering so hard the bed feels like it might come apart underneath them, wheezing on every breath. It doesn’t stop with him, once the dam breaks open everything comes rushing out. Dark hair in his hands, tying off braids with bits of stolen pink ribbon because it was his sister’s favorite color. A box that looked too small for the body inside it, holding his ma’s hands while she cried silent tears. Dancing, smiling at a different girl every night because the music made him feel alive. It’s like the first time all over again, when he’d disappeared into the woods and tried to force himself back to the quiet black nothingness. Just as painful, as chaotic and terrifying. But this time he doesn’t want to forget again. The pieces are coming together, shadows coalescing into faces, people, the look on Steve’s face the last time he saw him four sizes too small for his jacket, too much fight in a body that couldn’t possibly hold all of it. 

 

Bucky stays there until the cold makes his bones creak. Until he’s shivering even with his jacket pulled tight around him, breath making clouds in the air in front of him. Only then does he return to his body, legs stiff from immobility and metal humming soft next to him, a white noise he’s grown so used to he hardly ever notices it anymore. It’s strange, feeling the difference in the  _ him _ in his memories and the person he stands up as now, the new strength in his legs and the ghost of the once-broken badly-set knuckle on his left hand that’d always given him just a little trouble. He stands, breathing in the cold air and feeling its sting in his lungs, tips his head back and looks up at the sky. Cements himself in it, in reality, here in the middle of the years of memories swirling around him so fast he can only catch glimpses before they’re gone again, everything he’s been trying to escape and chase down at the same time for too long now. 

 

_ They’ve been looking for you, Bucky. _ That makes three, at least, Steve and the not-stranger at the door and himself, digging through dreams and new paint jobs and old street signs to find what it is at the center that keeps him going. He touches his cheek and his fingers come away wet, the stars look down on him and the tears running down his face, all alone with his thoughts. It’s peaceful, in a way, letting the ebb and flow of remembering surround him entirely in the dark, but he knows that won’t last. It never does, not for long. It ends up painful when he tries to make sense of anything, tries to sort through the decades and figure out where exactly he’s supposed to fit in this world only to find it’s moved on without him. 

 

_ I’m not gonna fight you. You’re my friend.  _

 

The picture paints itself inside his head: a background of explosions and orange-red fire, smears of smoke across the sky, violent and jarring and loud and catastrophic like they’d always lived. The cold water, closing over his head, the dead weight of a body in his hand, dropping too-limp on the shore. Wanting to stay, wanting him to wake up and plead  _ Bucky _ again, wanting to run as far away as he possibly could because the sharp points of fear pressing at the base of his spine at how much he doesn’t know are worse than anything he remembers ever feeling, the way he’d felt like he was going to pieces inside his head a thousand times over every second he looked at him. So he ran. And kept running, slipped through cities like a ghost and burrowed deep into wildlife when the people got to be too much, hoped to find somewhere he could set his roots that made remembering hurt just a little less, but never could. Came back home instead, to Brooklyn, to streets he wanted to be familiar but soon found they weren’t.

 

He finds the edge of the roof. Panic takes hold of his heart red-hot and terrible, making it pound in his ears and compete with the overlapping sounds drowning his thoughts, names he can’t find a face for and voices he doesn’t know the owner of. The ground is so close and so far away at the same time, cold and inviting. He steps up to the ledge, toes jutting out over thin air. Looks up at the sky again, at the moon hanging low and heavy. The fog that leaves his lips in one great sigh. Closes his eyes, stretches both arms out wide.

 

And falls. 

 

The scream follows him, the desperate reach even as the train speeds away. It’s cold, so cold, white with pain and ice and the coats he can’t ever stop seeing. He falls again, this time into water, after the same reaching hand, the same sad eyes that know too much, even though he doesn’t understand why he’s falling or why it’s a sick sort of beautiful. 

 

Bucky opens his eyes. Steps back from the ledge, just a little. Kate’s face appears in his mind’s eye, suddenly, banishing the past with a warm smile and an outstretched hand while he cowered starving and dirty like a frightened animal. Clint, handing him coffee and trying not to stare at him like he’s afraid. Kate, laying next to him on the roof and listening to him try and tell her what being a person made of smoke and mirrors feels like. Clint, making more noise than necessary so Bucky doesn’t startle when he’s neck-deep in a book at the table, cold coffee in one hand. He should say goodbye, at least. Thank you, too, for all their unending kindness and patience. For not giving him reason to run again when the memories got to be too much, instead distracting him with card games and jokes and Kate’s strange music and pizza. For making him  _ want _ to stick around. 

 

He climbs back down the fire escape. Lands on the ground nice and gentle, shoves his hands deep in his pockets and starts the long walk back. Almost thinks of it as going home,  _ almost, _ catches himself before he gets all the way there. Home is a dangerous word. One that never lasts long enough to be worth the heartache, the longing and inevitable distance. It can’t be home, now, not if Steve’s there. He’s not ready for that yet, and all the memories it comes with. 

 

By the time he makes it back, the sun is just barely rising. It’s too early to go back to the apartment, or too late. Either way, Bucky slips up to the roof, silent as a ghost, and tucks himself in the corner, curls his knees to his chest again and leans his head back against the ledge. From here, he’ll be able to hear the door opening before they see him and run before they can stop him, if he needs to. He watches the sun rise like that, hand pressed to the cold brick to keep himself in the present. Not that it works, really, but it’s grounding regardless, so he curls his fingers into it just a little, feels the roughness and wishes he didn’t feel like there’s a bird trapped inside his chest, fighting to escape. He wants to leave all over again, pick up the roots he’s put down here and disappear into nothingness again, leave Clint and Kate and their kindness he doesn’t deserve, the  _ knowing _ in the stranger’s eyes. Steve. All of it. 

 

But if there’s anything he’s learned, it’s that no matter how long you run, how fast, how far, everything always catches up. 

 

It’s well into daylight by the time he moves again. The stillness is comforting, sitting and not moving other than to breathe, a hold-out from his days burying himself in dirt and plants and smearing mud on his face to disappear into the scenery and wait to take a shot. His stomach is what gets to him, eventually, growling so fiercely Bucky half-thinks it might be alive and trying to kill him. So he goes back inside on silent feet, hopes with every bit of energy he has that he’ll make it back to the safety of Clint’s apartment without running into anyone, keeps his chin to his chest and holds his breath the entire way past the apartment right above it. The door opens with its customary shrill squeak, the sound like a homecoming. Bucky wants to memorize it, tuck it deep inside the layers of himself and hold on to the way it makes him feel like a weight’s been pulled off his shoulders forever. 

 

“You came back.”

 

Clint’s sitting at the table, holding a mug and looking at him with a little bit of a smile. If the circles under his eyes are anything to go by, he’s been up all night, waiting. Bucky closes the door behind him, undoes his boot laces with stiff fingers, tries to think of something to say.  _ I’m sorry for worrying you, _ maybe.  _ I’m sorry for running again. I’m sorry for taking up so much space in your life it’s gotten hard for both of us to breathe. _

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

He looks up from under his hair, catches the way Clint grimaces and then tries to wipe away the furrow between his eyebrows like he’s been asking himself the same thing.

 

“I,” he starts, and Bucky stands up, walks over to the table and settles down in a seat before he gets another word out. “We didn’t want to scare you off?”

 

It’s phrased like a question, like he doesn’t know if it’s enough of an explanation. It isn’t, not really, but Bucky lets it go. He’s flighty and skittish, that much is evident.  _ They’re coming back soon. We can’t keep him a secret forever, Kate.  _ In the absence of panic, of swirling memories and the itch to tear himself to shreds with the chaos of it all, there isn’t much left. Strip him back to the bone and all that’s left is the same quiet  _ I’ll do whatever it takes just to keep surviving. _ Because the truth is, he could’ve never come back. He could’ve thrown himself off the building in the middle of the night. He could’ve left Steve limp and soaking on the shore and blown his skull to bits where nobody would find his body before the coyotes. 

 

But he’s here. 

 

“I should’ve said something,” Clint says, staring down into his half-empty mug, knuckles tight around it like he blames himself for the whole thing. 

 

Bucky doesn’t know what to say to that other than  _ yeah, a heads-up would’ve been nice, _ so he keeps his mouth shut. The silence doesn’t last long. There’s a knock on the door and hardly a heartbeat in between that and the knob turning.

 

“Hey, Sam.”

 

Clint doesn’t look up from his mug, frowning at his reflection in the coffee inside it. Bucky looks between the two of them, wanting to get up and run all over again. The tug of familiarity makes a sudden, uncomfortable reappearance in the bottom of his stomach, a memory he can’t place. The door swings shut, the hinges’ squeak doing little to settle the urge to put distance between him and everyone else. 

 

“When’d you find him?”

 

Sam’s voice sounds sleep-thick, like he’s just woken up. A yawn confirms it, hidden behind one hand, and then he’s going right for the coffee pot, pouring it right into Bucky’s favorite mug. He watches all of this silently, immobile in his chair, tense and ready to bolt if Steve is next to appear. 

 

“He came back,” Clint says, looking up at Bucky for confirmation he’s still there. 

 

“You tell Kate yet? She’s still out searching.”

 

“Shit,” he mutters, standing up and going for the phone. Bucky frowns down at the table at the thought of Kate wandering around the streets checking out all the darkest corners and hard-to-reach rooftops he escapes to on bad days. 

 

Sam takes the seat in his place, leaning back in the chair and looking at him with the same strange mix of longing and something else. Anger? Bucky rolls his wrist under the table, listens to the shifting. Takes a deep breath in through his nose like Kate taught him, tries to ignore every instinct screaming at him to run before this goes badly. 

 

“Two years,” Sam says, voice quiet. “We’ve been looking for two damn years, man. And you turn up here.”

 

_ Two years.  _ He had no idea it’d been that long. Well, logically, yeah. He’d seen the seasons come and go, disappeared into the woods in northern Maine when the summer heat started to make his arm overheat and burn where its metal touched his skin, fled to the sun-bleached beaches of California or Florida or wherever the hell the sun was in the middle of winter. But it didn’t feel like years, not when he spent most of it in a haze, stumbling between now and then, trying to make sense of himself and the halfway point between the life he used to be full of and the lifeless machine he’d been forced to turn into. Two years is a long time to spend running from yourself or trying to figure out who that is or both. 

 

“Why’d you come back? I mean, not that it’s not nice to know I’m not gonna get my ass dragged to some European city at a moment’s notice, but still. Why now?”

 

Bucky doesn’t have an answer for him. He asks the same thing every damn day. Why come back? Why stay here, when it hurts just to look outside? Why not go somewhere he can fade into background noise and live out the rest of his days pretending he doesn’t feel like he’s not really living, just sitting somewhere on the line between existing and not? 

 

“I don’t know,” he says, looking up at Sam and finding understanding where he expected anger. “I guess I was tired of tryin’a hide from myself.”

 

Sam chuckles a little at that.

 

“Yeah, you’re real good at that, Barnes.”

 

“Bucky.”

 

“Right,” Sam says, a little surprised like he wasn’t expecting that familiarity quite yet. “Bucky.”

 

Behind him, Clint hangs up the phone. 

“Kate’s on her way back.”

 

He looks at Bucky, then back at Sam, and yawns. 

 

“I’ll leave you guys alone.”

 

Both of them watch quietly as he disappears, slow and shuffling, up to his bedroom. Bucky looks after him long past when he’s gone, torn between wanting to melt away into the fabric of somewhere that isn’t here, sitting next to someone that looks at him like Sam does, all soft and knowing and how it pins him to his seat, and wanting to stay there and find out more about the past two years, about Steve, about everything he’s missed. 

 

“Steve went home,” Sam tells him, finally, “I made sure he got there okay. Wouldn’t stop looking like he’d seen a ghost, though.”

 

_ He did, _ Bucky wants to say. They sit in silence for a while after that, until Kate bursts through the door in a rush with Lucky’s leash in one hand, barely pausing to catch her breath before she starts scolding Bucky for worrying everyone. He sits there and listens, silently, feeling worse about it with every passing second. 

 

“-so I thought I should take Lucky, but turns out he really sucks at being a bloodhound! Anyways, next time you run off like that and keep everyone up, you better be ready for me to kick your ass when you come back.”

 

“Jesus, Kate, let the dude breathe, will you?”

 

Sam’s looking up from petting Lucky hello, grinning at her. Bucky realizes all at once how out of place he still is here, no matter how long he’s spent sleeping on Clint’s couch. He can see it in the way they look at each other, easy in a way they don’t look at him. Comfortable. Not like they’re afraid of setting each other off, making one of them disappear into the streets for hours at a time at the drop of a hat. He stands up abruptly, drawing both of their eyes but paying them no mind. All he wants is some food and a nap, and then he’ll be gone. He’ll say goodbye to Clint when he’s well-rested and doesn’t look like he blames himself for everything, and Kate after that, and then he’ll apologize to Sam for making him search for so long only to come back and find out the person he’s been searching for is living a floor below him. And then he’ll really disappear, leave Steve a note explaining he’s never going to find his Bucky again, not the one that took him to dances and the Stark Expo and fought by his side in the war, because not even he can find that person and he’s the one living in his goddamn body. 

 

He eats a slice of cold pizza standing by the fridge, then another, watching Sam and Kate catch up, the former going between petting Lucky and drinking his coffee, the latter gesticulating wildly, both of them grinning. When he’s done, he passes them by to flop down on the couch, still fully dressed. Exhaustion hits him all at once, and before long, he’s out like a light. 

 

In a way, the dreams are the worst part of it. He falls. He’s shocked out of existence and then thrown to the wolves, again. He sees the bodies pile up, coloring him blood-red and terrifying, drowning in it, breathing it in and reaching for a gun. He watches Steve fall, then throws himself after him, freezes to death and jumps into the fire all at once. A little girl smiles at him, holding his hand. She’s got pink ribbons in her hair and then she turns to ash and blows away in the wind, leaving him with ash in a metal hand, reflecting a mask back at him, black and terrible. He remembers their faces, all of them. Pleading for their lives. Smiling, not knowing the crosshairs were on their forehead. The sick thrill of pulling the trigger, the metal bars and the white coats and being strapped back into a chair again, waiting for the pain and then the nothingness.

 

He wakes up in a cold sweat. It’s nighttime, now, the moon is laying soft and blue on the floorboards and Bucky’s shivering even though he’s wearing a jacket and Clint’s apartment is always on the side of being a little too warm. 

 

“Hey, man,” a voice whispers, so close that Bucky jerks and throws a punch on pure instinct and adrenaline. Flesh collides with flesh and he’s rolling sideways before he can stop himself, reaching up over his shoulder like there’s still a gun strapped to him, pawing desperately at his waist for a knife that isn’t there either. He comes back to reality sharp and sudden, focusing on Sam nursing his cheek and Lucky looking at both of them from the other side of the room like the commotion woke him up.

 

“Shit,” Bucky whispers, straightening from a crouch and relaxing the fists he’d curled his hands into, “Fuck, I’m sorry, I-”

 

“Nah,” Sam interrupts him, shaking his head. “I get it. Nightmares,” like this has happened before, or like he’s been the one waking up swinging. “They send you back home when it’s over but you never make it back all the way right in the head.”

 

_ I wasn’t dreaming about the war, _ he almost says, the words stopping just behind his teeth. It’s mostly the same, anyways. The gunshots and the bodies and the fire that never quite stopped burning inside him, even after years of trying to drown it in anything he could find. Sam pulls a bag of frozen peas from the freezer and settles on the couch, leaving space for Bucky on the other end. He sits down, slow and cautious, eyeing him out of the corner of his eye. Lucky walks over and settles on the floor between their legs, giving both of them a meaningful stare before stretching out with a sigh and closing his eyes. 

 

“I used to get nightmares real bad,” he says, soft and gentle. “Used to wake up shouting for my buddy Riley like it would stop him from being dead.”

 

_ Oh.  _

 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky tells him, again, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Sam shakes his head, offers him a little bit of a smile.

 

“Don’t worry about it. My fault, I should’a known better than to try and wake up someone like you.”

 

_ Someone like me, someone volatile and uncontrollable and only good for killing. _

 

“Someone dreaming like that, I mean. Nobody wakes up from that kinda nightmare smiling.”

 

The images comes back to him unbidden, drowning out whatever Sam says next. It’s Steve, waking up gasping for air in the middle of the night, choking on nothing. Steve, unable to sleep because he’s burning up despite the freezing rags Bucky keeps switching out over his forehead all night long, keeping him company through fever dreams and lucidity both. Steve, frail shoulders shaking at three in the morning after another dream of his mother’s smile. Steve, too nervous listening to the slow-approaching gunfire to so much as close his eyes. 

 

“You okay, man?”

 

Bucky snaps back to reality and realizes his hands are clenched so tight in his lap all the blood from his knuckles has drained, leaving it white and shaking, just a little. 

 

“Yeah,” he says, horribly unconvincing. “I’m fine.”

 

“You wanna talk about it?”

 

He lifts a shoulder in a sort of half-shrug. 

 

“Talking helps, man. It’s good to get that stuff out of your head.”

 

It’s not that he doesn’t  _ want _ to talk, exactly, just that he doesn’t know where to start. How is he supposed to explain what it feels like to exist like this, in some strange liminal space between James Barnes and the Winter Soldier? 

 

“It’s… hard,” he says, finally. “Remembering. It hurts.”

 

Sam nods, even though he can’t possibly understand what it’s like. Bucky appreciates the gesture anyway.

 

“That’s why you ran?”

 

“It helps. Makes everything slow down, enough to deal with.”

 

“I get that.”

 

He goes quiet again, pulling the bag of peas away from his face and touching it gingerly, wincing. Bucky wants to fill the silence with something, one of the countless things he’s never said, that he’s been keeping to himself for so long it’s any wonder he knows how to get words out at all.

 

“Steve makes the memories come back. I didn’t remember him after… everything. After Hydra. And then I did.”

 

Sam nods, again, like he understands. Something about the way he’s looking at Bucky makes him want to keep talking, so he does, a quiet flood words he didn’t know he had until now.

 

“I remember everything they made me do. For a long time, that was all I had. And then I saw him, and he recognized me, and everything came rushin’ back all at once. So I ran.”

 

“What was it like?”

 

The question is careful. Not prying, just opening another avenue for Bucky’s words to flow down. It makes anxiety prickle at the base of his spine, hot and unsettling, but he forges on, talking despite it.

 

“Some small piece’a you is awake,” he starts, digging his nails into the palm of his hand to keep himself from slipping back in time too much, “watching. Like being a passenger in your own body.”

 

The look on Sam’s face keeps him going, calm and open. 

 

“You struggle to break loose. Over and over again,” he says, voice tightening with the memory of the desperate fight against himself, trying to claw his way back to the person he just couldn’t find anymore, trapped inside a black box in his head. “You lose. And it makes whatever you’re forced to do that much worse. And when you finally get a chance to run… you don’t want to stop. Ever.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Sam says after a moment, the weight of Bucky’s words settling heavy over both of them. He shakes his head, offers his best effort at a smile.

 

“Don’t be. Not like you were the one doin’ it.”

 

It gets quiet, then. Not the peaceful kind, but the one that takes him by the throat and squeezes, little by little, until he can’t get any air at all. The slow smolder at the base of his spine flourishes, fanning itself into a blaze that lights up his insides, sends smoke up to burn his throat until he’s desperate for fresh air, desperate to feel anything other than the walls closing in on him, trapping him with their weight. 

 

“It’s late,” comes Sam’s voice, quiet, unaware of the tongues of fire painting Bucky’s insides red and black and painful, “I should probably get going, get some sleep.”

 

He doesn’t wait for a goodbye, just gives Lucky a parting scratch behind an ear and then goes. Bucky watches him avoid the spots on the floor that creak, open the door and close it slow so it doesn’t squeak so loud, how he walks around like he’s lived here before. Maybe he has. Maybe Bucky isn’t the only stray to pass through here, end up growing to love the building and its makeshift family, the cookouts on the roof that last until well into the night. There’s something too familiar about Sam for him to be so different, something Bucky recognizes in himself. He lays down again, stretching himself out over the couch’s cushions and closing his eyes. He tries to nail down exactly what it is that makes Bucky feel so at home, makes him want to open up so easily and say things he hasn’t spoken aloud before, not even to Kate, but he’s asleep before he’s made any real headway.

 

The world trips and falls into winter almost overnight. One day, Bucky’s sitting outside on the roof with Sam and Kate, drinking Clint’s terrible cheap beer and swapping bad jokes, and the next, they’re huddled around an electric heater taking turns letting Lucky pretend he’s a lapdog and watching the snow fall through the windows. With it comes Bucky’s want -  _ need _ \- to move, to chase the sunshine somewhere he’d only dreamed of going as a kid. San Francisco, maybe, where he could steal fresh fruit from street vendors and bury his toes in warm sand, or Texas, even though the flat expanses of open nothingness made him antsy. 

 

Sam starts taking him to an indoor track when the cabin fever has him running up and down the stairs until his legs burn. They run together, sometimes, but most of the time Bucky keeps his head down and sprints until he can’t breathe, smiling at Sam’s protest every time he passes him by. They form an easy friendship through the winter, making trips into the slush-covered streets in hats and gloves and scarves forced on them by Kate and returning with four overpriced coffees to share around an overly competitive game of cards. They keep their distance, though, circling warily like Clint and Kate do. Watching, waiting. Bucky’s distance is out of habit, unused to people that aren’t ready to beat him into submission should he show any sign of independent thought, people that won’t cut his throat for a chance to steal the clothes off his cooling body just for something warmer to wear. Theirs is a different kind of wary, the one that has them all sharing looks when he finds himself returning from memories minutes after he first left, hands shaking and yet another broken glass in his metal hand. They sweep up the pieces and look at each other to remind themselves that yes, he’s a weapon, he’s dangerous, don’t get too close or he might rip you to pieces. 

 

There’s something different about Sam, though. Bucky chalks most of it up to shared life experiences, to an extent. The way they both flinch at any sudden noises, the dark circles after a long night of no sleep haunted by ghosts of the past, the panic that catches in their chests and leaves them gasping for air when they’re alone and afraid. It’s a silent type of companionship, picking up on the body language, never moving too fast, staying in lines of sight,  _ I see you and I know. _

 

He finds Bucky pacing circles around the rooftop one evening when the snow’s just stopped falling thick and powdery, turned into a boot-pressed track beneath his feet. Stops him from freezing himself to death, talks to keep the air full of something other than slow-burn panic, draws him inside on the promise of warmth and a distraction. Bucky follows him down the stairs and tries to stop himself from shivering, tries to stomp feeling back into his toes. Tries to pull himself from the memory he’s been neck-deep in for hours now, looping over and over. Steve, wrapping himself up in so many layers he’d barely looked like a person only to take Bucky by the hand and drag him out into the street while the snow was still falling. How he’d had to pinch himself hard enough to bruise to keep from laughing at the picture Steve made, the only things sticking out being his eyes, sharp in the bright noon sun and nose, red with cold. How they’d hurled snowballs back and forth until Steve was wheezing again, how they’d tipped their heads back and let the snowflakes melt on their tongues. How, later, Bucky’d had to hold him tight to his chest beneath every blanket they could find because he just couldn’t warm up no matter how hard he tried. How Steve had never stopped smiling and telling him it was worth it for all the fun they had. 

 

They stop on the floor above Clint’s. Bucky almost keeps going out of habit, only catches himself as Sam opens the door and waves him inside. He looks around as he undoes the laces on his boots with slow, frozen fingers, pulling them off and leaving them by the door. It’s surprisingly homelike; there are dishes set to dry next to the sink, a few pictures stuck to the fridge with magnets. Sam tells him to sit down, so he does, only a little hesitant, in the chair pulled away from the table, and watches him pull two mugs from a cabinet, white and matching. The silence this time is comfortable silence, broken every now and then by Sam opening the fridge, pulling two spoons from a drawer, mixing chocolate into the milk, the hum of the microwave. 

 

“Here,” he says, sliding a mug across the table. “Good cup of cocoa never did anybody wrong.”

 

He’s right, Bucky quickly learns. The warmth is calming on his hand, trapping the spoon to one side of the mug as he takes a sip, chocolate melting rich on his tongue. 

 

“Thanks.”

 

“No problem, man. Figured you might need something nice and relaxing, but I didn’t take you for much of a tea kinda guy.” 

 

Bucky smiles. Kate’s tried to get him to drink tea on more than a few occasions, but he hardly made it past one sip before he either pushed it back on her or dumped the whole thing down the damn drain. 

 

“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s with the crop circles on the roof? Bad day?”

 

He lifts a shoulder, drops it. Takes another sip of his cocoa, sets it down, traces a finger around the rim of the mug.

 

“Not really. Just… memories. Can’t get ‘em outta my head.”

 

“Yeah, they tend to stick around like that.”

 

It’s part a joke and part sincere, in such true Sam fashion that Bucky just smiles and holds the cup between his palms, careful to keep the metal from closing too tight again. 

 

“What’re you remembering this time?”

 

This is the habit they’ve gotten into: Bucky putting words to the pictures in his head and ironing them out properly, whisking away the pain in the form of quiet conversation. He appreciates it, at least. Enjoys it, maybe. Some days it’s harder than others to explain it right, but Sam always listens no matter if it makes sense or not, always knows just what to say, how to keep him talking until he’s okay again. 

 

“Steve used to love the snow,” Bucky says like Steve doesn’t anymore, but really he’s the one that just can’t think it’s beautiful anymore, not after drowning in it one too many times. “We used to go out before the city turned it grey and throw snowballs until our fingers were near fallin’ off.”

 

He takes another sip of the cocoa, stares into the tabletop and lets himself fall backwards in time.

 

“Used to give him a cold every damn time, but that never stopped him. He’d drag me outside beggin’ and pleadin’ even though both of us knew he’d damn near catch his death from it.”

 

There’s a frown etched onto his face, a hard line of wishing he could go back to being the same careless boy in the alleyway with cold, wet socks and a giddy heart.

 

“Sounds like a good time,” Sam says, gently, even though he knows by now that remembering like this is never much fun. 

 

“It was,” Bucky agrees, and covers the way his voice goes tight and threatens to crack with the mug of cocoa, letting it run warm down his throat. He doesn’t know how to tell Sam that just thinking about Steve makes him feel less than real, like he’s just a cloud of smoke in the vague shape of a person and that it makes him want to scream. He doesn’t know how to tell Sam that without knowing it’ll tear him apart to admit out loud, that he can’t even think about the person he used to live for without wanting to run until he comes apart at the seams because Steve’s the walking embodiment of everything Bucky’s lost and hasn’t been able to find again.

 

“He misses you.”

 

Steve, at the top of the stairs, looking down at him with so much pain in his eyes it overwhelmed everything else. Steve, running after him, shouting his name a hundred different kinds of  _ please don’t leave me again. _

 

“I know.”

 

_ I miss him too.  _

 

“He thinks it’s his fault, Buck,” Sam tells him, bordering on too much. How does he tell Steve that it’s not  _ him _ , it’s just that looking at him makes it all hurt just a bit too much, without it ripping them both to pieces? Which is worse, telling him he doesn’t remember everything or admitting he doesn’t want to, not if it hurts this much? He wants to say Steve shouldn’t blame himself for anything but he knows better than that, knows that Steve will always think the whole world is his fault because he’s always been the bleeding-heart type. 

 

A part of Bucky wants to see Steve again, wants to hug him and tell him it’s okay, he’s not going anywhere, but the rest of him knows he can’t look him in the eye without remembering every horrible detail of punching over and over and over, how every bit of his body had been screaming at him to end it right then and there, watch the life drain from his eyes. 

 

“It’s not,” he whispers, finally. “If anything, it’s my fault. I should’ve stopped myself.”

 

_ I should’ve been stronger. _

 

Sam shakes his head.

 

“What you did all those years, man, that wasn’t you. You didn’t have a choice.”

 

“I know.”

 

He runs his thumb along the edge of the mug again, looking down into it like there’ll be anything but his guilt reflected back up at him.

 

“But I did it.”

 

There’s a beat of silence, and then a hand closes warm and soft over the back of his own, pressing it flat to the mug. Bucky looks up, finds Sam looking at him with something in his eyes he can’t quite read. Realizes that he can’t remember the last time someone touched him like this, with nothing but good intentions and genuine care. Before everything, maybe. It’s been so long that even the slightest brush of skin in passing makes every hair on his arm stand right on end, waiting for the second shoe to drop, the violent punchline that leaves him spitting blood and staring straight ahead like he didn’t feel the sting radiating down into his chest. 

 

Then Sam’s hand is gone again and Bucky finds himself without words, full of something he doesn’t know if there’s even a name for. He picks up the mug and finishes his cocoa because it’s the only thing he can think of to do other than stare at the place Sam touched him, left his skin warm against the air. He empties it and sets it back down on the table. Looks at the soft reflection of the light in the smooth piece of metal running along the back of his hand, turns his wrist to watch it bend and distort, to hear the soft whir of the mechanics inside doing their part. Sam stands, breaking the spell, and plucks the mug right out of Bucky’s hand, bringing both of them to the sink and leaving them there.

 

“Come on, you should get some rest.”

 

He puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder like an old friend. It shouldn’t make his insides twist but it does, the way he acts like Bucky isn’t a firecracker mess of a person, just waiting to go up in flames at all the wrong times. Touches him like it doesn’t mean anything. Smiles like it’s nothing. Bucky stands, trying not to look as confused as he is.

 

“You should sleep in a real bed, man. I’ll crash on Clint’s couch.”

 

Bucky nods. The combination of cocoa and worry mixing in his stomach isn’t leaving much room for anything else - and besides, it’s been a while since he’s slept in a real bed. He tries to remember the last time as Sam leads him to it, ends up with an unpaid hotel room, one he’d sweet-talked the girl behind the desk into giving him a key for. Somewhere down South, he remembers. Hot and sticky heat chasing him to sleep, fresh peaches in the morning that coated his mouth in soft-sweet juice. Disappearing into the heat-smeared skyline with one last smile to the same pincurled girl, unable to find the words to thank her for the first shred of kindness he’d been given in far too long to remember. 

 

The bed feels like a goddamn cloud. Sam’s saying something about how Bucky shouldn’t worry about it but he can’t help but feel like he’s taking too much all over again, like he couldn’t possibly deserve this, he doesn’t deserve to be given anything else because he’s taken so much already. He wants to say that much, at least, but by the time it escapes the whirlwind of his head and makes its way to his mouth Sam’s saying goodnight and shutting off the light, leaving Bucky lying there up to his chin in blankets and sinking fast into the bed. The sleep that finds him this time is mercifully dreamless, for the first time in weeks, and comes all at once.

 

When he blinks sleep out of his eyes, Bucky enjoys a perfect half-second of feeling genuinely well rested and comfortable before panic spikes hot and sudden in his chest, forcing him to dive over the side of the bed, throw himself back-first against the wall to scan the unfamiliar room, metal arm whirring like it’s gearing up to crush a throat or five. It takes a few minutes for him to dredge up the events leading to him being in an oversized bed in a room that he’s never seen before: pacing on the roof, willing away Steve’s wheeze of a laugh, unfreezing his toes under Sam’s kitchen table with a mug of cocoa in his hands.  _ Sam.  _

 

The rest of the apartment is empty. Bucky eyes it warily as he laces his boots back on, keeps his back firmly to the wall partly out of habit, partly from the prickling sense of being watched that he can’t shrug off. He’s eager to leave the place behind, too clean and too quiet, so he does, shutting the door quietly and heading down the stairs towards Clint’s apartment, doing his best to settle his nerves before opening the door. They’re all at the table when he walks in, frozen mid-conversation in varying degrees of trying to look casual about it. 

 

“Morning, Buck,” Sam greets him, smiling warmly. Clint nods his agreement and Kate busies herself digging into the untouched stack on pancakes in front of her. There’s more on a plate on the counter, too well-made and unburnt to be Clint’s. Bucky decides to ignore the way the conversation starts with a fumble as he fills a plate of his own and pours himself coffee, pretending he doesn’t know they were talking about something they didn’t want him to hear. About him, probably. About how he’s been here for too long, what are they going to do with him? What does one do with an ex-assassin living on your couch, anyway? Bucky blinks away the questions and perches on the arm of the couch, mug in one hand, plate balanced on his knees. 

 

He catches the way Sam’s eyes drift over to him as Clint and Kate carry the conversation, the way he smiles with every part of his face and the way it makes him feel strange and warm inside. Covers it with coffee, another bite of his breakfast. Pretends he didn’t see it at all. The other two don’t look at him all the way. Their eyes slide right off him when Sam finally excuses himself and leaves for his own apartment, the unmade bed Bucky left in a rush. Guilt, probably. Kate at least tries to smile, hurries away as soon as she’s finished eating, leaving him and Clint to share the awkward silence. It’s okay for a while, the same quiet it’s always been between the two of them, even comfortable. Bucky doesn’t mind quiet. Clint comes and goes in the same half-silent way: mumbled hello when he shoulders the door open, arms full of enough groceries to feel a small army - Bucky gets the feeling he knows exactly how much a small army would eat, so it’s a pretty reliable description - and same soft goodnight when he walks out of the bathroom, hair wet and bruises marking his freshly-shaven face, to disappear upstairs. 

 

The same quiet follows him around for a month. It lives in the cracks between the floorboards, in the scuff-marks by the door and the squeaking hinge that protests whenever someone comes or goes. Inevitable. Something unspoken, waiting for Bucky to get the hint. But he’s never been good at the whole mind-reading thing, not with anyone but Steve. So he runs. Spends half his time at Sam’s track, finding himself looking up every time he makes a lap and waiting for the protest when he opens his mouth to tease Sam for his lack of super-speed, closes it when he remembers he’s alone more often than he isn’t. Spends the rest of it wandering the streets, watching spring warm the cold, dark corners of Brooklyn. Finds that it’s easier this time around than it was before, when he’d first come back to a city that didn’t know him anymore, wasn’t built for his cocky teenage grin and Steve’s two left feet. It feels a little more like home now, at least. There’s a bakery two blocks from Clint’s building that he stops into, sometimes, just to smell the fresh bread and sugar in the air. The girl behind the counter always smiles like she recognizes him and maybe she does, or maybe it’s just instinct, but it’s nice anyway. Bucky always smiles back, sits by the window with the painted-on writing long enough to warm the early springtime chill from his good hand, and leaves before anyone starts asking questions. 

 

As all things do, the silence comes to an end much the same way it’d begun: slow and fumbling, over breakfast. Kate sits at the table with him and drowns a frozen waffle in syrup, eyes him like she’s working up the nerve to tell him something. Bucky keeps his eyes to himself, for the most part, figuring the least she could do is wait until he’s finished eating to break whatever news is obviously on the tip of her tongue. She does, in the end. She even waits for him to empty a second mug of coffee, lets him absentmindedly pet Lucky for a few long minutes, contemplating whether he should stay in Brooklyn when they kick him out or disappear into the woods now that it’s warm enough to technically be camping season.

 

“I’m taking you shopping,” Kate announces, pushing her chair back all at once, so fast Bucky goes stock-still to stare at her. 

 

“Shopping,” he repeats, dubious.

 

“ _ Clothes _ shopping,” she explains, dropping her plate in the sink and looking at him like he should’ve known that. Bucky looks down at his - Clint’s, technically - sweatpants and the hoodie he’d stolen from Sam at the track a few weeks back. 

 

“What’s wrong with my clothes?”

 

“Dude, you have like, two things you actually own.”

 

Boots, jacket. Both of which had been gifts. The rest borrowed, briefly, until Clint leaves an overflowing laundry basket on the kitchen table and he takes it down to the machines in the basement, listening to them hum in the dim fluorescent light. It makes sense, he thinks, that they’d want to impart one last gift on him before kicking him to the curb. Probably a guilt thing, but whatever. 

 

They end up in an uncomfortably large second-hand store, one Kate swears up and down is the best in the whole city. Bucky doesn’t care much, not really, especially when he finds the section full to bursting with sweaters like his ma used to make him wear in the winter. He spends a while there, picking through terrible scratchy knits and gaudy patterns and laughing over the particularly awful ones with Kate, before they move on to picking through the rest of the clothes. They pull the worst pieces from the rack and model them - Kate finds an honest-to-god flapper dress and Bucky has to sit down from laughing too hard at a memory of Steve going beet-red and nearly swallowing his tongue after seeing a girl twirl around in one for the first time. 

 

Hours later, they burst into the silence of Clint’s apartment talking and laughing, arms heavy with bags. Despite the sense of certainty that he’s walking into some miniature version of a goodbye party, Bucky’s actually happy as he bends to say hello to Lucky, letting Kate be the first to say hi to Clint and Sam. He leaves his bags by the door, not bothering to kick his boots off. Might as well make a quick exit easier. The three of them are waiting for him, lined up along the counter, each looking more nervous than the last. Kate’s the first, grinning at him with just as much excitement as she’d had when she dragged him into the dressing room to try on a hideous pink pinstriped suit earlier. Sam’s next to her, looking somewhere between guilty and excited, and Clint’s last, wearing the same sort-of-miserable, sort-of-not expression he always has on, holding a cup of coffee and nursing a bandaged hand. 

 

“Hey, Buck,” Sam greets him, offering up a smile that’s more polite than anything. Bucky returns it, walking over to sit down in one of the chairs by the table. Sam and Clint share a look. He waits for one of them to drop the bomb, quiet. Scratches Lucky behind an ear when he trots over. Doesn’t bother holding his breath. 

 

“Me and Clint have been talking,” Sam starts again, prompting Clint to finish the thought with an elbow.

 

“You’ve been here a while,” Clint continues, only a little hesitant, and Bucky looks away. He knows what comes next.  _ And we think it’s time for you to move on. _

 

“And we were thinking that, uh,” Lucky looks up at Bucky, leans his head against his leg like he’s saying  _ don’t let them make you leave, _ but he can’t promise that much. “If you wanted, you could move in downstairs.”

 

His hand stills on Lucky’s head as the words sink in. 

 

“There’s an apartment that’s been empty for a little while now. We put some furniture in it, you know, fixed it up. If you want to take it.”

 

Bucky looks up at Clint. Then to Sam, who’s giving him a reassuring smile, and Kate, who’s beaming. Realizes the strange lifting feeling in his chest is genuine happiness, relief at not having to leave. 

 

“I,” he starts, then stops, torn between saying  _ I’d love to, thank you,  _ and  _ I really don’t deserve it.  _ “I don’t want to make you miss out on rent.”

 

Clint shrugs, smiles into his mug.

 

“Don’t worry about rent. Having my couch back is good enough.”

 

He smiles at that, a little. Goes back to petting Lucky,  _ looks like I’m not going anywhere after all, pal.  _

 

“So, that’s a yes?”

 

Sam’s the one that asks, as if the tension sloughing off Bucky’s shoulders in waves isn’t enough of an answer. 

 

“Yeah,” he tells the three of them, standing up and suddenly feeling lighter on his feet than he’s felt in a long time. “Thank you,” he says to Clint, softly, and gets a nod in return.  _ Don’t worry about it. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One real quick note-- the part where Bucky's explaining to Sam what it's like to be the Winter Soldier is actually comic canon that I stole because it broke my heart to read. Poor guy.  
> As always, come cry with me on [tumblr](https://www.vystrx.tumblr.com/).


	2. three words that became hard to say

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someday, he’ll make sense of all of this. Someday, he’ll iron everything out and keep it folded with the corners pressed tight and smelling like starch. Someday, he won’t feel like a tangled, knotted piece of fishing-line caught on the end of a dock and struggling against the tide. Not today. He has to remind himself of this, often, that it’s okay to breathe and let himself remember, it’s okay to float back and forth in time until he finds his feet again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanna give a huge shout-out to my fantastic beta & best friend(/wife) [knucklehead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/knucklehead), because this fic wouldn't exist without her guidance, ass-kicking, and general putting up with all my nonsense. Go read her fics, they're amazing!

For all his worldly belongings fitting into three oversized plastic shopping bags, it takes Clint, Sam, and Kate a surprisingly long time to get Bucky settled into his apartment. It starts with a tour, lead by Kate, who takes credit for all the decor (which consists of mostly greys and her trademark purple). He trails after her, feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the effort they’ve clearly put into making him feel at home here. She takes him through the bedroom, where she makes him sit on the bed and points out just how much more comfortable it is than Clint’s couch - and she’s not wrong, not at all - and then to the bathroom, where she makes sure to point out the bottles of shampoo and conditioner she’d picked out for him. By the time they make it back to his kitchen, Sam and Clint are sitting at his table, Lucky spread out comfortably on the floor between their feet. It’s strange, seeing them so at home in a place that’s almost identical to Clint’s apartment but  _ isn’t, _ it’s  _ his. _

 

“You guys really didn’t have to do all this,” he tells them, eyes catching on a brand-new coffee pot sitting on the counter and smiling despite himself. He’s not nearly the caffeine addict Clint is, but a few months of living with him has ingrained the habit in his morning routine. Wake up, fold his blankets neatly, shower before Clint’s awake, make enough coffee for the both of them, and if it’s a good day, make breakfast. 

 

“You know, I kept saying that,” Sam says, an edge of joking on his voice and an easy smile on his face. “Barton kinda has a thing about rehoming strays, though. This is all him.”

 

Clint shrugs, smiling at Bucky.

 

“I told you, I just want my couch back. You really think I’d kick you into the street for that beat-up piece of crap?”

 

_ Yes, _ he doesn’t say. Kate punches him in the shoulder and Clint shoots her a look that’s halfway between guilt and  _ don’t try and make me actually talk about my feelings, _ so Bucky just smiles back and lets it go.  They drag him into conversation after that, and he bounces back and forth between laughing at Kate’s retellings of their thrift shop escapades and poking around in what little stash of food is waiting for him in his fridge. It’s nothing fancy, but he’s made a meal out of much worse. Even Clint finishes his plate without so much as poking fun at it, so by all measures, Bucky considers it a successful first meal. He waves Kate good-bye and scratches Lucky behind an ear when they’re the first to go, leaving him with Sam and Clint to drink cheap beer and talk. The beer doesn’t do much to him, he learned as much months ago, but it’s fairly enjoyable regardless, listening to the other two sling jokes back and forth.

 

They stay there for a while. Clint’s the first to fold, unsurprisingly, standing up with a yawn and a stretch, making a crack about being too old to be up so late before making his way out, leaving Bucky and Sam on either side of the table.  For a few long minutes, neither of them say anything. Sam finishes his second beer and sets the empty bottle next to the first, joining Bucky’s unfinished one. He feels like there’s something he should say, like  _ thank you for thinking I’m worth all this _ or maybe  _ I wish I could see what you do in me because it’s only a matter of time before I ruin this like I do everything else. _ But he doesn’t say anything, because Sam’s looking at him all strange again, like he’s looking straight through his skin to close his hands tight around the mess just beneath it. 

 

“You’re gonna stick around, right?”

 

Bucky blinks. Opens his mouth to say  _ of course, where else would I go? _ But he doesn’t want to make a promise he can’t keep, so he frowns and looks down at the table, suddenly finding all his words to be just out of reach.

 

“You’re a good guy, Buck. It’s been real nice having you around.”

 

The compliment startles him, a little. Sam’s not usually one for the sweet stuff, more of a friendly joke type person, barbed comments just caring enough not to actually hurt. 

 

“It’s been nice bein’ here,” Bucky tells him, and it’s the truth, he’s enjoyed staying here, with Clint and Sam and Kate more often than not. And now he’s one of them, with his own apartment and everything, more than just a transient ghost passing through the couch on his way to somewhere new. 

 

“Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

 

Sam smiles and Bucky returns it, genuine and warm. He stands when Sam does, takes their empty bottles and drops them in the empty trash can by the door. Gets a hand on his shoulder for the effort, another smile from Sam that leaves him hovering by the door long after he’s gone, wanting to chase after the feeling of being anchored by something other than his own two feet. He wanders around the apartment for a while after that, drifting through the space aimlessly. Trying to make the fact that it’s  _ his _ make sense, but it doesn’t work too well. He ends up closing himself in the bathroom and running the water hot enough to fill the room with steam, stripping off Clint’s borrowed clothes and standing under the shower until it’s cold. Kate’s shampoo smells good, like flowers and something that picks him up and spins him all the way back to a tiny apartment somewhere in Brooklyn where the light falls crooked across the bare wood floor, where he’s got his little fingers all twisted up in his ma’s hair, learning how to braid it tight for her while she’s busy fixing socks. He ties it together with a ribbon, ends worn and color long-faded but he likes it because it’s the same color as the skirt she’s wearing

 

The same hands, older this time, braiding darker hair and tying it off with pink ribbon, this time, stolen from the shop down the block where he’d pocketed a few penny candies, too, because they were sweet and melted on his tongue like stolen moments of paradise. Those hands, again, bleeding from all eight knuckles and pushing sweat-soaked blond hair back from a frail, smiling face. His hands, holding Steve’s tight, promising without words that he’s not going anywhere.

 

Bucky looks down at his hands. They’re mismatched, now. Not the same as the ones he remembers. Too guilty. Too deadly. He frowns, shakes the memories loose and tries to dislodge Steve’s smile from his head. It always comes back to him, in the end. Everything seems to. He shuts off the water and has all intentions of heading up to the roof to stop feeling like his chest is falling in on itself, but he gets caught in front of the mirror, something about the way his reflection stares back at him with eyes that know too much and too little all at once. He touches his face with his good hand, trailing fingertips over the skin, the stubble left over from a day-old shave. Runs his hand over his hair, hanging long and soaking against his skull. Stares at the person looking back at him, tries to reconcile that it’s  _ him,  _ ends up blinking away his discomfort and turning his back on it just like every other time. 

 

Someday, he’ll make sense of all of this. Someday, he’ll iron everything out and keep it folded with the corners pressed tight and smelling like starch. Someday, he won’t feel like a tangled, knotted piece of fishing-line caught on the end of a dock and struggling against the tide. Not today. He has to remind himself of this, often, that it’s okay to breathe and let himself remember, it’s okay to float back and forth in time until he finds his feet again. He twists his hair into a towel the way Kate taught him and doesn’t bother trying to pull a shirt on over it, wanders back out into the kitchen to trail his metal hand across the countertop, listening to the noise it makes with his eyes closed. 

 

Bucky sits at the table and leans back in the chair, casts his eyes across the dark, empty expanse of the apartment and sighs. Closes his eyes again, forces the tension in his shoulders to melt down towards the floor, forces himself to really breathe in the room’s stillness. It smells like paint, just a little, and soap and the leftover pasta sauce sitting on the stove. He sits there for a while, hands folded together in his lap and feet planted on the floor, ignoring the prickling unease in his spine that wants him to check every corner twice until he’s sure he’s alone, until he’s sure there’s no-one watching and no sights trained on him through the window. 

 

Eventually, the chair gets to be uncomfortable, so he gets up and wanders across the open floor, shedding the towel as he goes, shaking his hair out loose and damp around his face. It’s pointless, really. The apartment is exactly the same as Clint’s, even in the furniture placement and especially in the color scheme. They’ve got some weird thing with a very specific shade of purple, Clint and Kate, not that Bucky’s complaining, because it’s a decently appealing color and the familiarity of the same lavender-ish  _ everything _ is comforting. He ends up in the bedroom after a fairly long time spent staring out the window at the street below, and doesn’t bother drying his hair all the way, just resigns himself to having a damp pillow for the sheer fact of  _ holy shit this is the softest thing he’s ever laid down on and he’s never going to get up. _

 

Exactly fifty-seven minutes of tossing, turning, various limbs stuck out of a blanket that’s either too hot or too cold, and too many different pillow combinations to count later, Bucky gets up. The silence is too strange and unfamiliar for him to sleep, he decides. He keeps waiting to hear Clint snoring, or Lucky chasing a dream squirrel, and gets nothing but the somewhat muffled city noise. It sets him on edge, for some reason, and he can’t shake the feeling that he should be perched on a fire escape somewhere, his back to a wall and a gun in his hands. Old habits really do die hard. He tries heating up leftover pasta, but the sauce isn’t right and he’s not hungry anyway, so it ends up joining the bottles in the garbage and Bucky goes back to pacing. 

 

It doesn’t last for very long. He’s full up of anxious energy that doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere, no matter how quickly he runs through the streetmap he’s assembled in his head. Left from the front door, straight until the bakery with the red-haired girl behind the counter, right at the corner where the sidewalk splits strange beneath his feet, keep going until the fenced-in tree on the island between the lanes. Stop, breathe in the smell of syrup and eggs if it’s early enough for the restaurant on the corner to be serving breakfast, wine and roast meat if it’s dinnertime. Remember that this is the way things are now, fast and loud and newly familiar. Turn around and go back the way he came, counting off streets in his head until he hits the stairs that take him to Clint’s front door, where there’s food and coffee and friendly faces waiting for him.  _ Home.  _

 

Bucky’s pacing takes him into the bathroom and he tugs on the shirt he left sitting on the floor, avoiding the mirror entirely. Then, he’s out the front door before he can convince himself otherwise, taking the stairs two at a time on silent feet until he’s stopping in front of Sam’s door. He raises a hand to knock and stops. What if he’s sleeping? He wouldn’t take kindly to being woken up this late, especially not if it’s nothing important: just Bucky, teeth worrying into his lower lip with nerves, afraid of the night-dark silence. He knocks, just quietly enough to be slept through, and listens. Stands still long enough that he’s about to turn and leave when the knob twists and the door opens. Sam looks at him, stifles a yawn behind the back of his hand, waves him in without a word. Closes the door behind him, even, follows him to the table and settles into the chair across from him.

 

“Couldn’t sleep?”

 

“Yeah,” Bucky answers. Weighs, briefly, telling him about how the silence was just too much, figures Sam will understand what he means without the explanation. He always does. 

 

“Figures. First time I stayed up here, I ended up watching shitty B-list movies for three days until exhaustion took me out. Didn’t go down without a fight, though. Lots of energy drinks. Wasn’t pretty.”

 

Bucky almost smiles at the picture, until he realizes that it might as well be him. 

 

“It’s just too quiet, y’know? Dunno why it bothers me so much, all of a sudden.”

 

“Because it’s new,” Sam tells him. “New things can be freaky.”

 

They lapse into silence for a little while, long enough for Sam to yawn again, long and emphatic.

 

“Did I wake you up?”

 

Sam shakes his head.

 

“Couldn’t sleep either.”

 

“Why not?”

 

Bucky asks quietly, putting the offer on the table if Sam wants to take it. It’s not like he’s the only one with a closet full of skeletons, after all. Something flashes across his face - sadness. It’s gone as fast as it appeared, and Sam just shrugs.

 

“You know,” he starts, vague and Bucky can tell right away that he’s crossed a line into somewhere Sam isn’t quite ready to go right now, “memories.”

 

Trying not to berate himself for unwanted digging, Bucky nods.

 

“Yeah, I know.”

 

The quiet is less comfortable after that. Bucky doesn’t ask after the way Sam’s looking at the table, brows drawn tight and eyes far-away. He knows that look too well, too personally. Sam gets up suddenly, dislodging Bucky from his thoughts, and begins their ritual for late nights like this. Deep conversations are no good without cocoa. They’ve gone through what’s probably an unhealthy amount of it lately, but neither of them care much about the potential health impact of consuming a metric fuck ton of the stuff, so Bucky doesn’t complain when Sam hands him a mug of it, steaming hot. 

 

“So, quiet?”

 

Sam stirs his mug, more of an idle motion than anything. Bucky shrugs, one-shouldered.

 

“Feels like I’m just waiting for something to happen. Dunno what, but... something.”

 

“I know the feeling.”

 

Neither of them say it, but they both know what’s implied. Long nights spent with gunfire too close for comfort, waiting to die. Long nights spent waiting for the gunfire, which was always worse than anything. Once they start, it’s easy to keep going, trading quiet words over their cocoa, and before long, they’re all out of both. Bucky stands at the same time Sam does, and when he goes for the sink, Sam stops him with a hand on his arm, the other taking the mug from him. 

 

“I got it,” he says, and when he pulls away, Bucky doesn’t miss the way his fingers drag just a little longer than wholly necessary on his arm. He even stands just a little closer, maybe, while Sam fills both mugs with water, leaning against the sink and definitely not staring at Sam’s easy smile. 

 

“You wanna crash here? I don’t mind,” Sam says, after he shuts off the water, and Bucky knew the offer was coming.

 

“Yeah,” he says, slow like the answer isn’t obvious, and adds a quiet, “thanks, Sam.”

 

“Hey, no problem. I get it.”

 

Bucky follows him up the stairs, sits on the side of the bed and lets him fuss with the pillows for a minute before laying down with a pleased little sigh. Sam sits on the other side, looks at him with an expression that’s halfway to trying to say something, but Bucky isn’t quite sure what.

 

“I can stay until you fall asleep,” Sam offers, mostly to the blanket. “If you want.”

 

“You don’t have to go,” he says before he can stop himself, “there’s room.”

 

“Oh.”

 

His brows draw together again and Bucky’s stomach drops, waiting for the rejection.

 

“Okay.”

 

He gets up and shuts off the lights, and neither of them say anything. He climbs into bed, leaving a generous few inches between them, which means he’s probably near falling off the bed, but still, neither of them say anything. Quiet holds the room tight, and Bucky feels like he’s holding his breath.

 

“Night, Buck,” comes Sam’s voice, finally, and he smiles into the darkness.

 

“Night, Sam.”

 

For once, he doesn’t dream of much. There’s a bit of a party, something with bright lights and loud music and champagne coating his tongue bubbly and sweet, but it slips away fast and featherlight before he can grab hold of it. Then he’s waking up, rolling over and realizing the bed next to him is empty. It takes several seconds before what that means clicks into place, and then Bucky’s pushing himself upright and drawing a hand through his hair, sleep-messy and tangled. The sun is falling through the shuttered window onto the foot of the bed, casting light around the room. Waking up here isn’t nearly as terrifying now as it was the first time, when everything was shaped wrong and too warm-colored. 

 

He makes it downstairs after a few minutes of trying to get his hair into some sort of order in Sam’s mirror, telling himself it’s common courtesy not to look like a swamp monster and not some sort of urge to want to actually  _ look good.  _ Because there’s no reason for that. Obviously. Sam’s at the stove, busy cooking up a storm. There’s waffles on one plate, bacon on another, and he’s got eggs in a pan in front of him, a pot of coffee fresh and steaming nearby.

 

“Morning,” Bucky says, and Sam throws a smile over his shoulder before turning back to the pan. 

 

“Morning,” he replies. 

 

Bucky goes about making a cup of coffee, dumping a generous load of sugar into it because, unlike Clint, he actually has taste buds and doesn’t particularly enjoy drinking a cup of liquid tar. It’s not long before Sam is filling the table with breakfast. Bucky’s stomach growls in appreciation, so he digs in without further ado.

 

“I stopped by Clint’s earlier,” Sam says around a mouthful of waffle, “he and Kate are heading out for the day. Said something about letting you adjust.”

 

Bucky grunts, too busy demolishing his own stack of waffles to say much. The rest of breakfast passes in similar fashion, conversation overshadowed by food. This time, though, he doesn’t let Sam take his dishes from him, instead beating him to the sink and elbowing him out of washing anything, not even a single fork. Sam gives in after a valiant fight, which lasts all of five seconds, and ends up leaning against the counter next to him, coffee in hand. Bucky doesn’t think about how he catches Sam’s eyes on his face well after they’ve stopped talking. Definitely doesn’t think anything of it. Ignores how he can’t seem to get rid of the little smile on his face, even when he’s scrubbing burnt egg remnants from a pan with a ball of steel wool that’s no friendlier to his metal hand than his real one. 

 

Once the sink is empty, Sam makes them both a cup of cocoa and they settle into the couch, deciding after another brief argument on the least awful-looking rom-com offered on Netflix, something about forbidden love that would normally put Bucky to sleep, but between the cocoa giving him an honest to god Pavlovian urge to dredge up some terrible, traumatic story and Sam’s knee pressed firmly against his, Bucky stares straight into the TV like a drowning man, desperate for literally anything that isn’t terrifying and/or confusing to think about. The first movie segues into a second, equally as terrible rom-com, and by the third, they’ve somehow ended up together from the hip down.

 

“Fuckin’ loveseats,” Sam says, disparagingly, as he elbows Bucky no less than three times in the process of standing up after the credits roll on the fourth movie. He drops their mugs in the sink and Bucky’s only a little disappointed that their marathon is over, but then his stomach growls and reminds him he’s only consumed several mugs of cocoa and an entire bag of chips since breakfast. As if on cue -- 

 

“You wanna order food or something?”

 

“I can make dinner,” Bucky offers, and almost immediately regrets it when he remembers he doesn’t actually have anything to make.

 

“Sure, if you want. I’m gonna shower first. Meet you downstairs?”

 

“Yeah, sure.”

 

With that, Sam disappears into the bathroom, and Bucky leaves for his apartment. He very quickly discovers that Clint and Kate’s knowledge on what constitutes an actual stocked and functional kitchen is… lacking at best. There’s frozen pizzas in the freezer, along with a lone stick of butter in the fridge, a loaf of bread in a cabinet, several boxes of pasta, and assorted canned and/or jarred goods that look like they’re in competition with him for age. The best he can do is pasta, again, this time paired with a jar of sauce from the back of a cabinet that, despite looking like it survived at least one World War, tastes and smells alright. Bucky just hopes Sam either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. Or, in the best-case scenario, he’s used to Clint’s diet of Chinese takeout and pizza, so it’ll taste great regardless of how dubiously ancient the sauce is. He’s  _ definitely _ going to make Kate take him grocery shopping the next chance he gets.

 

By the time Sam walks through the door, Bucky’s got the pasta in boiling water and the sauce heating up in a pot next to it, the jar neatly disposed of so as not to raise any eyebrows that don’t need raising. 

 

“Smells good,” he comments, opening the fridge in search of the beer he and Clint had left there the day before. Bucky keeps stirring the sauce and doesn’t say anything, hoping it lives up to expectations, considering Sam can pull an entire three-course meal out of nowhere and he’s only just really figured out how to work a stove right. 

 

“Hope you like pasta, ‘cause that’s pretty much all I have.”

 

Turns out, Sam doesn’t mind pasta. At least, it doesn’t seem like it, because between the two of them, they polish off the full box’s worth of pasta in record time. They end up with a sink full of dishes and Bucky’s weighing the pros and cons of raiding Clint’s freezer in search of ice cream when Sam reaches into his pocket and pulls something out of it, silver and wrapped in a white cord.

 

“Here,” he says, passing it across the table. Bucky takes it, turns it over in his hands.

 

“It’s an iPod,” Sam tells him, “I used to use it when I ran. For music.”

 

“Oh,” Bucky says, unwrapping it to stare at the black front of it. He’s seen these before, in passing, but hadn’t really known their point.

 

“It should help with the quiet.”

 

Sam stands up, comes around the other side of the table. Presses a button along the top, and the screen lights up all in blue. Bucky does his best to pay attention to the explanation as to how the thing works, exactly, but it’s kind of hard considering Sam happens to smell  _ really _ good and he’s just really, really not used to being in this kind of close proximity with someone else for longer than thirty seconds. Sam’s been leaning over his shoulder, close enough to  _ almost _ be touching, explaining how the screen works, and if Bucky didn’t know any better, between the obnoxiously complicated technology being shoved down his throat and Sam’s shirt dragging over his shoulder, he’d think this was all some elaborate ruse to make him absolutely lose his shit.

 

“So,” he says, stopping Sam in the middle of telling him how to make something called a  _ playlist _ , whatever the hell that means, “you’re saying I just… touch it? And it’ll play music?”

 

“You sound like my grandmother,” Sam tells him, so Bucky elbows him in the gut and taps a song at random.

 

Nothing happens. 

 

“You gotta actually put the earbuds in your ears, dude.”

 

Sam picks up the…  _ things _ at the end of the wire, and Bucky’s thoroughly unimpressed. He does, however, stick them in his ears, and is immediately much more impressed when he can actually hear the music. It doesn’t last long, though, because the music is quite possibly the most awful thing he’s heard with his own two ears. He smiles, though, and pulls the earbuds out of his ears, because it’s the thought that counts.

 

“Thanks.”

 

“Least I could do, man.”

 

He straightens up and backs away and Bucky would be lying if he thinks for a second he doesn’t immediately miss the closeness. 

 

“Well, I’m gonna get going,” Sam says, and Bucky glances at the clock, realizing it’s decently late. 

 

“See you,” he says, absent-mindedly running his metal thumb across the flat screen in his hand. 

 

“See you,” Sam replies, and then he’s gone.

 

Bucky sits at the table for a while, picking through the music on Sam’s iPod, one earbud in so he can figure out which songs aren’t entirely terrible. It ends up being most of them, really. There’s a decently wide range, all of it entirely unfamiliar, but Bucky enjoys it regardless. Eventually, he ends up heading to bed, laying down and letting the music play. Sam’s right. It does help. Before long, he drifts off to sleep, one ear full of gentle guitar and the other not minding the quiet half as much. 

 

It works like that for a while. The music helps with a lot of things. The memories, for one. It keeps them from taking him by the throat and squeezing until he’s all out of air, keeps him tethered to the here and now instead of leaving him stranded and trying to figure out which way is up. Bucky spends most of his time with one earbud in, humming along to whatever’s playing. He especially likes it when he runs, drowning everything else out with something loud and fast and angry. It makes being alone almost comfortable,  _ almost _ . He still spends the bad days with Sam and Clint and Kate, whenever they’re not busy doing whatever it is that keeps them going in and out at all hours of the day. He doesn’t ask, and the worn, tired looks on their face after being gone for a few hours too long gives Bucky the impression they don’t really want to talk about it, either. Things stay like this well through the spring, when Bucky has to double up a garishly yellow raincoat and Clint’s dog-patterned umbrella just to make it to the track without showing up a soaked wreck in the torrential April rains. And into May, when it gets warm enough that he starts running outside again. 

 

Sam gives him shirts made for exercise when Bucky starts coming back earlier and earlier, the thick city heat too much in the long sleeves he wears to hide his arm. Not that he needs to, really, but it’s easier to run without being bothered when he’s not drawing every eye on the block by flashing bright silver everywhere. They’re tight-fitting and comfortable, and more importantly, cool enough. Kate’s the one that starts getting him to tie his hair up, doubling the cooling factor. Bucky even lets her braid it, just once, in two twin pigtails that hang down either side of his neck and make Sam turn red choking on his sandwich. He doesn’t do it again, because he can’t get the image of pink ribbon out of his head and it makes his mouth taste like metal. 

 

As May moves into June, Bucky finds himself running less and walking more. Sometimes Kate comes with him, talks his ear off the whole time, and he doesn’t mind it. Brooklyn’s grown to be familiar again, fitting like a glove around him. Natural.  _ Home.  _ He doesn’t mind the word so much, not anymore. This city is home to him, its chipped brick corners and busy sidewalks. So is Clint’s building, and the cookouts that pick back up when Sam offers to fire up the grill one sunny afternoon. They play music from someone’s speaker and Bucky ends up punch-drunk off whirling Kate around to some jazzy, upbeat song that reminds him of crisp lines of his uniform and spinning skirts, of which he can never remember the owner’s face. Afterwards, he and Sam retreat to the fan-cooled calm of his apartment and drink cocoa, despite it being entirely out of season. Neither of them care much about it. The talking’s nice, and what’s a good conversation without cocoa? 

 

Bucky buys some of his own, tries it when he can’t sleep, but it’s not as good when he’s alone. So he and Sam start a new tradition, one fit for summer. Cocoa on the roof at midnight, watching what few stars they can pick out of the light pollution and the smog. Bucky remembers when he could see a whole sky full of them, sitting out in a field somewhere there weren’t any people for miles around. They talk, sometimes. Other times, they don’t say anything, just sit there and listen to the world around them, drink everything in. The companionship is the important part, really. Just having someone there, physically there next to him. Something about it is grounding. Comforting. That’s the only time Bucky really turns the music off, leaves it sitting on his kitchen table in favor of letting the silence ebb and flow between them. 

 

Bucky’s baking when Sam knocks on his door, wearing the purple apron Clint only partly jokingly gave him a few weeks ago to keep flour off his clothes, his hair tied up in a neat knot on his neck. He pulls the earbud out of his ear and leaves it on the kitchen table - out of harm’s way - and goes to answer it.

 

“Hey, Sam,” he says, going right back to his bowl to keep mixing.

 

“Hey, Buck. Whatcha making?”

 

“Brownies.”

 

Sam sticks a finger in the bowl, lightning-fast before Bucky can stop him, so he ends up with a mouthful of batter and a smear of it on the back of his hand from a mistimed spatula strike, which he licks off with a crooked grin. Bucky scoffs and elbows him out of the way before he can steal another fingerful. Sam lifts his hands in mock-surrender and goes to sit at the table, picking up Bucky’s iPod as he goes.

 

“Seriously, dude? Guns n’ Roses?”

 

“I’m not defending my music taste to the guy that listens to Salt-N-Pepa.”

 

“Hey, fuck you, they’re great.”

 

Bucky snorts and picks the bowl up, pouring the batter into a nearby pan.

 

“Whatever you say, Sam.”

 

He sticks the pan in the oven and sets a timer, then picks the iPod out of Sam’s hands before he can find anything else to poke fun at. Expecting at least a jab at his apron, Bucky settles into the seat opposite Sam with a retort on the tip of his tongue, but nothing comes. Sam’s face is unusually closed-off, only a little hint of a frown readable.

 

“You okay?”

 

Bucky extends the question carefully, ready to backtrack should things go suddenly pear-shaped. 

 

“Yeah,” Sam starts, not looking up at him, and Bucky knows more is coming so he stays quiet, tucks the iPod into his pocket and lets Sam take his time. 

 

“Steve wants to see you.”

 

Immediately, the room goes tense. Bucky doesn’t say anything for the space of several long seconds, trying to focus on keeping himself from slipping backwards. He wants to drown it out with music, but Sam’s looking at him strange and gentle, like he’s waiting for Bucky to say no. 

 

“He’s a good guy, Buck. He doesn’t deserve this.”

 

He knows what  _ this _ is. Sam doesn’t have to explain it. He’s overheard conversations between him and Clint, caught bits of quiet one-sided phone calls.  _ He’s not doing well. Distracted. Misses him. Thinks it’s his fault. Lost.  _

 

“I know,” Bucky tells him, meaning it earnestly despite how weakly it comes out. Remembers the look on Steve’s face at the top of the stairs like he’d just had his heart ripped out of his chest. It’s selfish, is what it is. How afraid he’s been of thinking about him, dealing with the memories he dredges up, all the missing pieces that make Bucky feel like he’s going crazy. 

 

“He’s been moping around like a lost puppy for months now,” Sam says, as if Bucky needs to feel worse about the whole damn thing. 

 

“When?”

 

He asks mostly to keep Sam from telling him something worse, somehow. Sam shrugs, looks up at him. Bucky holds his eyes, despite wanting to look away and crawl into a hole and not come out until he’s not replaying the second he’d told Steve how soon he was shipping out over and over again, how his face had cracked and fallen around the brave smile he kept trying to wear. 

 

“Whenever.” 

 

Bucky takes a deep breath. Does his best to settle his nerves, figures there’s no sense making Steve wait any longer. Might as well bite the bullet.

 

“Tonight? For dinner.”

 

“Tonight,” Sam repeats, as if he’s not sure he heard right. Bucky just nods, keeping his mouth shut so he doesn’t have a chance to change his mind. “I’ll give him a call,” he says, and stands. Bucky stays sitting as Sam crosses to the far side of the apartment, staring straight down into his lap and doing his best to keep his breathing steady. Fingers shaking, just a little, he pulls the iPod from his pocket and shoves an earbud in his ear, hitting play and trying to focus on the music. On the other side of the room, Sam’s talking into his phone, quiet enough that Bucky doesn’t listen to what he’s saying. It’s several long minutes before he comes back, looking like he’s at the crossroads of uncomfortable and relieved.

 

“He’ll be here at six.”

 

Bucky nods, not trusting his voice. Sam’s looking at him like he can’t decide whether he wants to hug him or tell him  _ took you long enough.  _ For a long, breathless moment, neither of them say anything.

 

“Thank you,” Sam says, softly, breaking the silence. Bucky opens his mouth to say  _ for what?  _ and decides against it, just standing up and going to the fridge instead. He picks through it, looking for something that’s decent enough to feed to Steve, anxiety making his hand just the littlest bit unsteady. Ends up pulling out a package of chicken, hoping he can remember an old recipe well enough to make him smile, at least. 

 

“Buck,” Sam says, even quieter, and his shoulders go tense at the way he says it, like he’s worried Bucky’ll explode on him. He turns around, trying to put a smile on his face and ending up with a tight half-grimace. 

 

“I know I’m asking a lot,” he tells him, dropping the edge of fear and putting a hand on his arm, warm and reassuring. “I’m gonna be there if it gets bad.”

 

“Thank you,” Bucky says, except it comes out a whisper, sounding painfully small. 

 

Sam just nods, once. He doesn’t need to say anything. The implication is in his eyes, in the way he’s looking at Bucky all intense and paralyzing, keeping him in place against the counter.  _ You can’t run from him forever,  _ he’d said.  _ Both of you deserve more than that. _

 

Then he’s gone, saying something about how he’ll be back with Steve at six, and the door’s being pulled shut before Bucky can shake himself out of it. He closes his eyes, leans back until his head touches the cabinet, and focuses on breathing in and out, slow and even, until his heart stops pounding. 

 

Bucky isn’t a chef by any means, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t know how to make something at least decently edible. Especially when he’s got enough nervous energy to run a goddamn generator on his own, which explains the veritable  _ feast _ spread out across the kitchen. Sort of. He’s not sure how most of it happened, really, but by the time he comes out of a hard-rock induced cooking haze, there’s enough food to feed the entire building twice over. The clock informs him, politely and in in bright red numerals, that he has approximately thirty-six minutes to get his shit together before Steve shows up at his door, most likely as annoyingly punctual and puppy-eyed as he always has been. 

 

He takes the fastest shower he’s ever taken in his life, even counting the time it was December and the heater was broken and the water was so cold he’d frozen himself halfway through by the time he’d washed the soap out of his hair. With thirty-one minutes on the clock, Bucky’s sitting cross-legged on the floor blowdrying his hair, mulling over what the hell he’s supposed to wear. At seventeen minutes, he’s setting the table with the least dollar-store looking dishware he owns. Nine finds him pacing back and forth in front of the couch, barely taking his eyes off the door long enough to make sure his feet are going in the right direction. At one minute til six, there’s a knock on the door, three sharp hits with all knuckle, not half-handed and easy like Sam. Bucky freezes, going cold all over. Paces into the kitchen and takes one single, steadying breath, wiping his sweaty palm down the leg of his pants before opening the door. 

 

Steve’s got that same expression on his face from the first day on the stairs, like he’s staring right into the eyes of a ghost. Bucky stares right back, reflexively reaching up to tuck a stray piece of hair behind his ear. 

 

“Hey, Buck.”

 

Steve’s quiet, the kind Bucky instantly recognizes for him trying to put on a brave face. He smiles and finds it comes easy, genuine. Reassuring. Or trying to be, at least.

 

“Hey,” he says, and Steve’s eyes go soft. It makes Bucky’s stomach twist, tight and uncomfortable, but he steps back anyways, inviting them in. “Hi, Sam.”

 

Sam follows Steve in and touches his arm, the  _ thank you _ unspoken in his eyes. Bucky shuts the door and turns around, catching Steve’s eyes jump from his metal arm to his face, guilt filling them. It makes Bucky want to dive sideways out the nearest window and not come back until he stops feeling like he’s seconds away from disintegrating into the floorboards. The three of them stand there, in his kitchen, Steve looking at Bucky like he wants to say something but can’t figure out how to make his voice work, Sam looking at Bucky like he’s just waiting for him to turn and run, and Bucky, feeling like the worst dinner host imaginable. 

 

“How’ve you been?”

 

Steve speaks up, eventually, sounding like he might actually start crying.

 

“Good,” Bucky answers, nodding a little and hoping to god Sam does something to defuse the tension before he stress-bakes eight different desserts. Steve smiles. Looks away, picking at the side of his thumb like he always does when he’s nervous. 

 

“Dinner smells nice,” Steve says to the table, smile unwavering despite the wobble in his voice. Bucky looks at Sam, the  _ please for the love of god do something _ as evident on his face as he can possibly make it, and he just shrugs,  _ what the hell am I supposed to do? _

 

The uncomfortable silence lasts another few long seconds before Sam finally clears his throat and breaks it up.

 

“I dunno about you guys, but I’m hungry.”

 

He goes right between them and sits down, leaving a chair on either side for Steve and Bucky. They follow suit, and Bucky’s glad he doesn’t have to sit next to Steve, at least, before he looks up and realizes that spending the entire meal staring at him and trying not to disappear into last century just might be worse. Thankfully, Sam saves the day again and prods Steve into conversation, who looks like he may very possibly want to be there less than either of them, despite the fact that he keeps sneaking glances at Bucky that remind him of the way Clint looks at coffee when Kate’s just yelled at him for drinking too much of it. It’s easy enough to get going once Sam’s got things going, though, and before long, all three of them are talking, laughing, and eating. 

 

“Buck,” Steve says, laughter in his eyes, “You remember the time we had to ride back from Rockaway Beach in the back of that freezer truck?”

 

A picture comes to him as soon as the words are out of Steve’s mouth, fuzzy but there. Steve, clinging desperately to a metal handle, wind whipping through his hair and stealing the laughter from his chest. 

 

“Was that the time we used our train money to buy hot dogs?”

 

Steve grins, leaning back in his chair.

 

“You blew three bucks tryin’a win that stuffed bear for a redhead.”

 

Bucky blinks, keeps smiling despite his stomach going sour when the memory doesn’t come. He tries to force it out, tries to imagine what Steve’s face must’ve looked like when he kept dropping quarters on something both of them knew he wasn’t going to win, but there’s nothing there.

 

“What was her name again?”

 

Something on Steve’s face changes, just a little. He goes far-away for a split second and then he’s back, smile picking up just enough weight for Bucky to know something’s off.

 

“Dolores,” he answers, voice lacking the tease it’d been wearing for a while now. He’s trying, though, Bucky can tell, but it’s not quite the same. “You called her Dot.”

 

_ Dot. _ It sounds familiar enough, like he should have at least  _ something _ , but he can’t find a face to go with the name, much less a memory. Bucky smiles anyways, pretending he remembers.

 

“She’s gotta be a hundred years old right now,” he says, trying not to think  _ they all are, that or dead.  _ Steve’s smile gets a little more genuine, the corners of his eyes wrinkling, but that weight doesn’t go anywhere, not really.

 

“So are we, pal.”

 

For a long moment, they just look at each other.  _ The man out of the time and the one lost in it,  _ Bucky thinks. He wishes he didn’t remember the last seventy years. That’s the sick irony, really. The fact that out of everything he  _ does _ remember, clear as day, it has to be that, everything Steve doesn’t have except bloodstained and broken and not neatly packaged up in a photocopy of the file marked  _ Classified _ Sam’d taken for him when he found himself missing all the important parts. 

 

“I’m gonna hit the head.”

 

Sam excuses himself like he’s trying to elbow one or both of them to say whatever’s obviously sitting heavy on the air between them and all but runs for the bathroom. Steve looks away as he goes, down to his plate, frowning a little. As soon as the door’s shut and they’re alone, Bucky takes a deep breath and says what he’s been trying to say all night.

 

“Steve,” he starts, and Steve looks up at him with something like hope in his eyes that makes it just that much harder to force out what comes next: “I’m sorry.”

 

He searches for something to say next, reaches deep inside everything he’s been carrying since leaving Steve alone and soaking on the shore.  _ I’m sorry for running. I’m sorry for falling apart over and over and losing more of myself every time. I’m sorry I’m not me anymore. I’m sorry I’ll never be me again, not the me you knew. I’m sorry for disappointing you. I’m sorry. _

 

“You don’t have to be,” Steve says. “It’s okay.”

 

_ No it’s not, _ he wants to say, but the words just aren’t there. 

 

“I shouldn’t have waited this long,” Bucky tells him.  _ I shouldn’t have pushed you away for this long. _ Steve smiles again, the light in his eyes reaching across the table and snaring Bucky by the neck, dragging him back and back and back all the way to another lifetime, a thousand of the same smiles buried beneath the years on every streetcorner from here to the river, on every block, on every rooftop they’d climbed, in every alley they’d fought a losing fight, on battlefields an ocean away. 

 

“We’re here now.”

 

“Yeah.” Bucky looks at him, really looks at him, determined to remember  _ this _ Steve, the one that’s looking at him like he’s just hung the stars in the sky all over again, like the world can’t touch the two of them all over again. Oh, how he wishes he could believe it again. “We’re here.”

 

Sam reappears from the bathroom and the moment’s over, Steve looks away and Bucky’s stomach distinctly remembers what it feels like to fall a thousand feet through cold air. The weight is gone, though. The room feels less… tight, like whatever’d been holding its breath is gone now. Doing what he’s best at, Sam prods the conversation back to life with a well-placed crack along the lines of  _ if you two are any indication, twentieth-century dinner parties are so boring it’s no wonder they called it the Depression _ . Steve laughs at it before socking him in the shoulder and telling him kids these days don’t know how well they have it, and even Bucky manages a heartfelt little chuckle. Sam and Steve trip and fall into easy conversation, letting Bucky clear the empty dishes and fill the fridge with leftovers in silence. He doesn’t mind it, because Steve’s eyes are on something other than him and it’s marginally easier to look at him like that. Marginally because of how he’s looking at Sam, with the same look on his face like he’d pulled a damn star out of the sky and handed it over. 

 

He’s not jealous. Bucky convinces himself of it, mostly, because it’s not fair to be jealous of Steve having an actual friend in Sam instead of him, not when he’s the one who’d run from him for two years and then run all over again and refused to even look at him for months afterwards. He clears the table and then empties the sink of dishes, fills the wire rack sitting on the counter and they’re still talking and laughing. Bucky sits back down and doesn’t miss the way Steve’s eyes catch on him for just a second too long, the way his smile falters before the wall drops down on his eyes again and he goes back to wherever he goes when he looks at Bucky like that. The effort Sam makes to keep both of them talking is valiant, really, but it’s like trying to watch a newborn giraffe stumble on four legs that don’t want to work together, ultimately crashing into the ground where it stays, unable to figure out how to get going again. 

 

Eventually, Steve says something about it being late, he should get going, and Bucky tries not to agree too quickly. There’s half-moon dents in his palm from digging his nails into his skin in an attempt to keep himself from disappearing down a wormhole of memories that sting when he tries to wipe the sweat off his palm as he stands. 

 

“I’ll see you around,” he says, smiling at Bucky all warm and hopeful.

 

“Yeah,” Bucky answers, finding the same warmth in himself, somehow, to return the smile, “see you soon, Steve.”  

 

A pair of arms wraps around him and hugs him like he’s done it a thousand times over. Bucky freezes, just for a second, before returning it one-armed, careful to keep his metal arm away from Steve, not sure how he’ll react to the unpleasant reminder that Bucky’s not the person he used to be. When Steve pulls away, the same sadness is haunting his face, the kind that makes a lump rise in Bucky’s throat.  _ I’m sorry, _ he wants to whisper, but he doesn’t. Just turns to Sam and tries a smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

 

“I’ll be back in a few,” Sam tells him, and follows Steve out of the apartment. 

 

The door swings shut and Bucky’s legs go out from under him, leaving him trembling like a damn leaf, flung haphazardly across a chair, chest going tight. The urge to run rises, sharp and sudden, the need for ground moving fast under his feet and sky opening wide and unending over his head. Bucky almost heeds it,  _ almost _ , then he remembers the twinkle of hope that wouldn’t leave Steve’s eyes every time they looked at each other, the way he talked like he’d only just figured out how to smile again. He’s still sitting there when Sam comes back in, staring blankly at the floor and drowning, waves of lost time crashing over his head. He wants to hold onto the way Steve’d held him, wrapped him up tight without a shred of the hesitation everyone else carries, even Sam. He doesn’t want to forget it ever again, how warm and solid and  _ real _ it’d been. 

 

The door opens again. Sam walks up to him; Bucky knows it by the way he carries himself with just a little extra swing in his step like the way his smile’s always a little crooked. Stops in front of him, puts a hand on his shoulder. 

 

“Hey,” he says, all soft and careful,  _ I’m here now, it’s okay. _

 

“Hey,” Bucky whispers back, shaky and uncertain.

 

“You okay?”

 

_ No, not at all. _ Bucky stands up, lurches to his feet and his breath catches in his throat, comes out shuddering and Sam puts a hand flat on his arm, the one that can feel its warmth. 

 

“Breathe,” he reminds him, gentle, and Bucky looks at him, opens his mouth to say  _ I can’t _ or maybe  _ I can, now that you’re here, _ but nothing comes out. He just looks at Sam instead, hoping the overwhelming terror filling his chest instead of air makes sense to him.

 

“He couldn’t stop smiling the whole way downstairs, you know,” Sam says, because of course he knows exactly what to say, he always does. “Said it was the best dinner he’s eaten in years.”

 

Bucky manages a weak smile, a little bit of a laugh.

 

“Thank you, Buck. I know it wasn’t easy.”

 

_ I would do it again in a heartbeat to get close to him like that again. _

 

A part of him wants to admit it out loud, that what really hurts is how much he misses Steve. Another part of him doesn’t want to, because that means admitting it to himself, too, and he’s not quite ready for that yet. So he thinks about the sadness that danced through his eyes when Bucky’s memory faltered and he couldn’t find the tail end of whatever story he was telling. 

 

“I’m not the person he wants me to be,” he says, almost without meaning to, but it feels better to hear it out loud instead of just echoing around his head, “not anymore.”

 

He’s not the cocky twenty-something with an easy smile and a head full of all the memories they’d made together.

 

“No, you’re not.”

 

Sam takes him by the shoulders and looks right at him, right  _ into _ him.

 

“But you’re you. And the one thing I know for sure is that he’d do anything for you.”

 

_ He’s barely met me _ , Bucky thinks. He knows, almost for certain, that that’s the one thing Sam’s wrong about. Steve wouldn’t be able to handle the person he is now, not with all his jagged edges and mismatched parts and everything he just doesn’t have, not anymore. Bucky wants to say all this, to let it all out to air, but he can’t. Won’t, maybe. The way Steve looked at him is still too raw, all the disappointment and the hoping for something better, something that isn’t  _ this. I’m sorry I’m not enough. _

 

“Maybe once,” Bucky says, quiet. Forces a little smile like it’s alright, because there’s nothing he can do about it. Maybe Sam’s right, and Steve just doesn’t know how to show it. Or Bucky’s reading him wrong. It’s not like he knows Steve the same way he used to, when he could all but read his mind. They’re as good as strangers now. 

 

“Buck,” Sam says, and Bucky realizes he’s doing it again, disappearing into his head when the world get too hard to exist in. He realizes, also, that he’s shaking again, making his arm whir louder than usual in the near-silent kitchen. The sound just sours his stomach, another unpleasant reminder that no matter how much he desperately wants to, you can only remember the past, not go back and live in it. And, lucky for him, he can only do the first one half the time.  

 

Then Sam’s hugging him, and the bitter internal monologue falls straight through into something vaguely resembling shock. Bucky finds himself clinging to him, curling the fingers of his real hand into the back of Sam’s shirt and trying valiantly to breathe right, but everything he’s been trying to ignore since Steve walked through his front door breaks and washes over him, sharp and painful. He realizes he’s crying, shoulders shaking with the effort of it, and Sam’s rubbing little circles into his back, whispering  _ it’s okay, let it out _ into his ear. So he does, all of it. Hides little hiccuping sobs in Sam’s shoulder, until he finds himself fresh out of tears and instead just feeling miserably empty. He’s not sure which of them pulls away first, but suddenly he’s looking at Sam and his eyes drop to his mouth and something in the back of his head whispers  _ kiss him. _

 

So he does. For all the moments he’s felt time disappear, none of them compare to this. It’s just Sam’s lips on his and the way his hand touches Bucky’s jaw like he’s something breakable, and nothing else. 

 

A floorboard creaks under his foot, reminding him that there’s a world larger than this, larger than them, and it’s over just as quickly as it’d begun. Sam’s looking at him like he’s just grown a second head and Bucky feels like he might’ve, considering how  _ out of fucking nowhere _ that was.

 

“I,” he mutters, stepping back abruptly and ignoring the way something falls on Sam’s face, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-”

 

“Bucky,” Sam says, cutting him off entirely, and for a second Bucky wants to kiss him all over again. He takes a breath, smiles, but it doesn’t make it to his eyes all the way. “You should get some sleep.”

 

Bucky nods. Tucks a piece of hair behind an ear. Looks away. Clears his throat and finally starts for his bedroom, climbs the stairs one by one and realizes Sam is behind him. Realizes he’s glad for it, because he still feels shaky and uncertain and less than whole. He turns around when he’s well enough into the room and finds Sam looking at him, doing that  _ thing _ where he flays Bucky open layer by layer until there’s nothing left for him to hide.  _ What are you still doing here,  _ he wants to ask.

 

“I can stay,” he offers, softly, like he’s expecting Bucky to say  _ no, never, _ “if you want.”

 

_ I know it’s easier when you’re not alone, _ he doesn’t say, but Bucky knows it’s what he means anyway, so he smiles and means it this time, pretends he doesn’t want to kiss him  _ again _ for offering.

 

“Please,” Bucky says, because there’s nothing left to say besides  _ I’m sorry _ and he knows Sam doesn’t want to hear it. So he climbs into bed, not caring if he’s still in his clothes, exhaustion hitting him cold and solid in the chest as soon as he lays down and pulls the blankets over himself. Sam shuts off the lights before making the mattress dip next to him, only inches away, but it feels like there’s something deeply unmoveable between them a thousand miles wide. 

 

“Night,” comes the whisper, eventually, and Bucky distinctly feels as though there’s a fifty-pound weight settling on his chest.

 

“Night, Sam.”

 

It’s not long after that he drifts off into sleep, however fitfully. Bucky dreams in short bursts: a girl with blood-red hair and a cold face whispering to him in passing, saying things like  _ you are more than a dog _ and  _ you are strong even when they call you weak _ and  _ do not let them take that from you _ in a language to harsh to be English. Another girl, this one young, calling his name with a stolen candy in her cheek and pink ribbons in her hair. Listening to someone else’s radio on a warm night through an open window, the newscaster grim. Music, spinning people and laughter and liquor. For once, he doesn’t dream of Steve.

 

When he wakes up, the bed is empty. It doesn’t strike him as odd for a few long, peaceful seconds before reality’s set in entirely, but then the other shoe drops and so does the pit of his stomach. Bucky rolls out of bed and takes his time changing out of the previous night’s clothes, hoping to some higher power that Sam’s somewhere close by, not scared off entirely. 

 

There’s a note waiting for him on the table, scrawling handwriting on a scrap of paper nearly too small.

 

_ Duty called _

_ S _

 

Part of him feels like he deserves it. The other part of him wants to crumple up the note and hurl it at the wall over and over until he feels better. He fills a mug with coffee and doesn’t drink it, stares out the window until his untouched mug grows cold in his hand, thinking. Not about much in particular, really, just letting his mind wander. It circles back around more than once, coming back time and time again to how Sam had pulled him just a little closer, how he’d followed him up the stairs, how he’d  _ stayed.  _

 

Eventually, Bucky needs to move. He leaves Clint’s building behind without looking back, walking. It’s nice enough out that there are people filling the streets more than usual, summer tourists getting their fill of Brooklyn. The sun’s well enough up that it’s warm out, too, decently so. Bucky wanders for a while, listens to the city sounds and falling into pace with the foot traffic. It’s comfortable enough being able to melt into a crowd. Distracting. He ends up ducking into a familiar bakery, the AC much-needed. It’s hot out, and there’s sweat beading up on the back of his neck where his hair sits thick and suffocating. The girl behind the counter recognizes him and smiles, and on a burst of confidence, Bucky goes up to the register for the first time, half-heartedly scanning the chalkboard hanging behind her.

 

“Afternoon,” she says, bright and cheery, “what can I get for you?”

 

“A coffee,” Bucky says, after fumbling briefly. “And, uh-”

 

He looks at the glass-fronted pastry case next to the counter, trying to decide on one quickly enough. 

 

“We just brought the raspberry danish out from the oven,” the girl says, probably sensing his mild panic, “they’re delicious.”

 

“One of those, then,” Bucky says, finding the smile comes easy as he pulls the card Clint’d slipped him a while back from his pocket and hands it over. The girl hums to the radio playing through the shop as she rings him up and hands it back.  _ Natalia, _ he wants to call her, and can’t quite remember why. The red hair, he thinks, though it doesn’t make much sense. He waits by the counter until she hands him his coffee and the danish on a little paper plate, then smiles and thanks her before picking a table along the window, the one tucked into the far corner, only pausing to stir milk and sugar into his coffee before settling down. He looks out through the glass for a while, listening to the shop’s soft ambiance and the radio playing from one corner. Spends most of his time thinking, again, but this time it’s all half-blurred and cobwebbed with age.

 

_ Natalia.  _ Someone’s saying the name and it isn’t him, it’s too whipcord and iron. Piano music, a line of girls that don’t look like killers but they’ve got knives strapped beneath moving skirts; they’re deadly weapons themselves. He would know. Someone yells in a language that isn’t English, and they stop dead still where they are, frozen in time. The room shifts, falls sideways into silvers and greys and one long smear of blood trailing to the corner of the room where there’s a body and blonde hair and Bucky refuses to look at it except he isn’t Bucky, he’s just fists and quiet eyes that wish they could say  _ I’m not doing this to hurt you. I’m only doing this to make you stronger, see? _

 

_ Natalia.  _ She punches him, catches him off-guard and lands a hit square in his stomach. He smiles all teeth and  _ feral _ , hears someone mutter low and guttural, so he flips her and they dance. They dance with their fists and quick feet and most of all with their eyes, how they talk without moving a muscle.  _ Faster,  _ he thinks, and she ducks under his silver arm and they’re off again. She’s good. Almost impossibly so. She matches him hit for hit, spins around and under every move he makes, wears too-smart eyes that seem to know everything.  _ Zvezda, _ she hisses when they’re close enough, over and over like a name.  _ Star, _ Bucky translates, slowly, an ode to the red adorning his arm and his uniform.  _ Zvezda, _ again, this time a challenge. The word wears a smile when it leaves her lips though her face stays stone-cold. They dance faster, more terrifying, this time there’s flashing blades and he’s careful not to cut her because a strange, unfamiliar part of him doesn’t want her to feel pain. Doesn’t want her to  _ know _ pain any more than she already does. 

 

Bucky shakes himself free of the past and takes a bite of his pastry. It’s still warm, and the filling melts in his mouth sweet and perfect. Across the shop, the girl behind the counter meets his eye and smiles. She doesn’t look much like Natalia, he decides. It’s just the hair. A part of him wonders if she’s still alive, somewhere, still wearing her deadly-sharp eyes that smile all on their own. He puts the thought out of his head. Even if she were still alive, it’s not like he’d be able to find her. What would he say, anyway?  _ I’m sorry for making you a weapon? _

 

He finishes the pastry while it’s still warm. Holds his coffee between both hands even though one of them doesn’t feel its warmth, not really, and looks out at the street again. This time he thinks about Sam all over again, but mostly about kissing him. It’d felt right in the moment, like it was the only thing he possibly could’ve done, but the more time he puts between himself and the second he’d decided to do it, the worse he feels. He finishes the coffee and sits there a little while longer. Eventually, Bucky decides he doesn’t need to overstay his welcome, and he lifts his real hand in a small wave to the red-haired girl on his way out. As the sun goes down, the streets cool off, little by little, and the city switches gears from daytime to nightlife. Bucky always likes watching it happen, how the neon signs flicker on and cast pools of colored light out onto the sidewalk and the whole atmosphere switches just like that. 

 

There’s a group of kids bunched together outside a bar, talking and laughing the way only careless twenty-somethings with newfound freedom and a heady sense of invincibility can. He remembers it, distantly, being young and feeling the air under his wings for the first time. He wishes he could remember what it was like to feel so completely untouchable by life or time or the way both of them are intimately designed to tear people to pieces. Before it’s too late, though, Bucky makes it back to Clint’s building, the draw of home unavoidable. He almost makes it into his apartment, too - his hand’s on the knob, turning, when Kate’s voice stops him short.

 

“Bucky! Everyone’s outside, come hang!”

 

He wants to say  _ not tonight, I’m not in the mood, _ but he knows Kate well enough to square his shoulders and smile and follow her all the way to the roof without a single complaint, despite the dread growing heavy in his stomach. There’s no way Sam won’t be here, not if there’s food and beer and laughter. Sure enough, when he trails behind Kate out into the night air, Sam’s sitting a few feet away, talking to Clint, a beer in his hand. Both of them look exhausted, Clint with fresh bruises and new bandages covering his arms and face, Sam with the worn-down look he only gets after long missions. Bucky wants to say something, wants terribly to go over and join the laughter for a little while before telling them both that they really should sleep like he has every other time they’ve tried to drink off the tiredness of fighting. But he doesn’t. He makes for the far side of the roof instead, ducking behind a body to hide from how fast Sam’s eyes catch him, how piercing they are. A girl whose name he can’t remember smiles and waves at him, a baby on her hip. He tries to smile back and gets most of the way there, but he drops it the second she’s not looking anymore. Kate’s standing over by where Clint and Sam are, he can see the side of her shoulder between two people. 

 

Bucky stays in his corner for a while, content to sit and watch everyone else have a good time. He tries to tell himself he’s not purposefully avoiding Sam and the questions he’ll undoubtedly have, but it doesn’t hold up very well. Especially when the crowd starts to thin enough for Sam to be able to look at him again out of the corner of his eyes like he doesn’t think Bucky can see him, like he wants to get up and say something. Bucky doesn’t give him the chance. He’s up and heading for the door before he can tell himself to stop trying to run away from all his damn problems, head down, hoping nobody stops him.

 

They don’t. He disappears down the stairs and into his apartment with silence dogging his heels, trying not to tell himself he’s just making things worse. The walls feel too small around him, even when he’s blasting music into his ears as loud as he can stand, so he leaves. Takes to the streets and just walks until he barely knows where he is, until the sky is turning the familiar ash-grey that comes just before the sun. Only then does he turn home, taking his time getting there so the city has a chance to wake up around him. 

 

Bucky only stops home long enough to heat a can of soup on the stove and eat it staring out the window at the street. He leaves again as soon as the bowl’s empty and sitting in the sink, in search of something that isn’t uncomfortably empty without Sam there to fill the silence. The bakery’s just opening when he crosses the street towards it, so Bucky walks in, greeted by a familiar shock of red hair behind the counter and a cheerful smile just beneath it. 

 

“Morning,” she calls, and he tries to smile back. 

 

“Morning,” he says, softly, surprising himself with how tired he sounds. He doesn’t feel it. 

 

“What can I get you today?”

 

“Coffee, please,” he starts, glancing at the pastry case. A muffin catches his eye, sitting front-and-center, so he decides  _ why not.  _ “And a blueberry muffin.”

 

She nods, and goes about assembling his order. Bucky stands there, shifting his weight from foot to foot and doing his best to keep himself firmly rooted in the present. It’s hard, when she smiles at him like she just  _ knows _ even though he knows she doesn’t, she’s not the person his head keeps telling him she is. A cup of coffee and a muffin on a little paper plate makes an appearance on the counter, and Bucky takes it with a little nod and drifts to his corner table. 

 

The coffee’s black and horribly bitter on his tongue, but he doesn’t bother getting up to fix it. It keeps him from thinking too much about Sam, and besides, he’s drinking it for less for the taste than the caffeine. He doesn’t  _ need _ it, not really, but it helps his feet drag a little less, and besides, it’s better than sitting in his apartment moping around and wondering why Sam hasn’t said anything. The radio’s playing something swingy and vaguely reminiscent of a particular summer evening spent down at the docks, chasing down the last bits of childhood between the damp planks of wood and pretending things aren’t falling apart. Bucky lets himself fall head-over-heels into it, the way his pants had been rolled up just enough to avoid the puddles of leftover rainwater from soaking them through and how giddy he’d felt with the evening-cool air running salt through his hair. 

 

Steve’s laugh fades into the memory, edged with the rattling wheeze he’d always had after moving a little too fast, voice calling out  _ Buck, come look!  _ all breathless and smiling. Bucky can’t remember what he’d been holding, but he smiles down at his cup regardless, and picks up the muffin. The tide of customers ebbs and flows as the morning rolls on, slow and languid with the unmistakable late-June weight. Eventually, Bucky moves on, lifting his hand goodbye to the girl, who pauses in the middle of wiping down the counter to smile and wave back. He wanders, then, until his feet drag impossibly heavy and he wants nothing more than to fall into bed. So he does exactly that: makes his way back to Clint’s building in a haze, pushes into his apartment and heads straight for the shower, shedding clothes as he goes. The water runs cold and refreshing down his skin, turning the metal of his arm to ice as he stands there, leaning heavy against the wall, eyes closed. He pulls himself out of it eventually, towels off and has the presence of mind to wrap his hair before burying himself in his blankets and falling straight into dreamless sleep.

 

Bucky wakes up hours later to someone knocking on his door, heavy-handed and insistent. Acting on pure instinct, half-asleep, he rolls sideways and comes up coiled and ready to defend himself. Blinks. Looks around the empty room. Reminds himself he’s here, he’s home, he’s  _ safe. _ The knock comes again, even more urgent than before, so he calls out  _ coming!  _ and yanks on a pair of sweatpants and a shirt, tugging the towel off his head and scraping his hair into some semblance of order in the form of a low knot at the back of his neck as he heads for the door. 

 

It’s Sam. Bucky stares at him. Blinks sleep from his eyes, maybe hoping that he’s just dreaming and he’ll wake up back in his bed with Clint yelling at him to open the damn door because he can’t find the master key. No such luck. Sam clears his throat, looks away awkwardly like he’s hoping he’ll wake up standing at someone else’s door. 

 

“Hi,” Bucky says, eventually, and Sam looks at him again. He wants to say he’s not relieved when he sees the familiar smile lines crinkle up just a little, but he’d be lying. 

 

“Hey.”

 

Neither of them say  _ I’m glad you’re here, _ but Bucky gets the feeling Sam shares the sentiment, if the way his shoulders loosen up when he steps back and invites him in are any indication. The silence persists all the way until Bucky’s got a pot full of milk on the stove, heating it up with two mugs and his half-empty jar of cocoa powder next to it. 

 

“Steve called,” Sam starts, the same way someone might say  _ the weather’s real nice today, _ an attempt at defuse the tension. “Says he wants to see you again.”

 

Bucky pours the milk into the mugs before he responds, giving himself time to think of something better to say than  _ that’s nice _ or  _ that’s all you came here to say? _

 

“Oh,” he ends up with, trying to phrase it like a question and ending up with something like disappointment. Sam gets up and stirs cocoa into his own mug, using too much powder like he always does. They sit down, the silence more uncomfortable with the half-finished conversation between them.

 

“We could get coffee sometime,” Bucky says, just to say something,  _ anything.  _ “You, me, Steve, I mean.”

 

Sam just nods, doing a bad job of hiding the look of disappointment on his face with his mug. Bucky looks away. Takes a sip of his own cocoa, tries to tell himself he doesn’t have anything to apologize for. The quiet drags on, as it seems to particularly enjoy doing. Until-

 

“Look, man, we gotta talk.”

 

Bucky thanks every God he’s ever believed in that he’s holding his mug in his flesh hand when Sam talks again, because the way the metal shifts all sharp and sudden and violent has broken more than one mug before. 

 

“Yeah,” he says, without looking up. 

 

“Did I piss you off or something? ‘Cause you’re acting like I killed your cat, dude.”

 

At that, Bucky looks up at him, trying to figure out if he’s joking, because there’s no way he’s serious. He’s asking if  _ he _ did something? There’s nothing on Sam’s face but genuine concern, like he fully believes the stilted conversation and disjointed silence that’s been making a canyon between them is somehow his fault.

 

“If this is about me leaving, I had to, I didn’t really have a choice,” Sam says, doing the thing where he keeps talking with that annoyingly easy confidence like it’ll cover the fact that he’s rambling thanks to nerves.

 

“I’m not mad at you.”

 

Bucky cuts him off before he can slide another quip in about  _ duty calls _ or an equally as awful Avengers pun, setting his mug down on the table. 

 

“You’re not?”

 

Sam sounds… relieved. He looks it, too, despite the confusion edging his voice. 

 

“Then what was with the sulking on the roof?”

 

It’s a genuine question, Bucky knows that much, but the way Sam phrases it is so oblivious it makes him want to take him by the shoulders and shake until he  _ gets it,  _ or maybe kiss him all over again. Or both. He’s not really sure. 

 

“I thought you were mad at me,” he tells Sam, picking up the mug again just to have something to do with his hands. 

 

“Why would I be-” Sam starts, more confused than before, and then realization dawns on his face. “Oh.”

 

_ Yeah, oh.  _ Bucky’s still torn between shaking and kissing. He’s not really sure which would be more appropriate in the given situation, and it’s making him want to dive sideways out the nearest window and not come back until Sam says something that helps him decide. 

 

“You know I didn’t mind that, right?”

 

_ That, _ like it was just an overly emotional outburst or an accidentally burned dinner. A mistake. Bucky looks down at the mug resting on his leg, half-full of cocoa gone lukewarm by now, and then back up at Sam, who’s looking back at him the same way he always does when they’ve talked things out like this: open, warm, and completely unreadable. He doesn’t know what to say. If there is anything at all to say.  _ That _ , like it was nothing. 

 

He wants to tell himself that’s all it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic started out planned as maaaaybe 10k max, and somehow ended up here. Whew. This chapter was supposed to be the last one, but I got carried away (again) while writing it and ended up stretching it all the way into a third. If you wanna come yell at me for being incapable of writing anything short, my tumblr is [here](https://vystrx.tumblr.com/)!


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